Index Ventures

We're proud to back Anrok's $55M Series C! 🎉 40% of the Forbes AI 50 use Anrok for tax compliance. As companies scale from $1M to $50M, tax complexity grows 47x—and most teams still handle it manually. Anrok is building the infrastructure layer that lets high-growth companies operate globally without the compliance burden. Read more from Anrok on today's news 👇 https://lnkd.in/gs4jW5_W

AI adoption across enterprises remains patchy. While some companies are building complex in-house solutions, many more remain stuck in cycles of experimentation and testing. This is where nexos.ai comes in – and why we're thrilled to co-lead their €30m Series A alongside Evantic Capital, following nexos.ai’s $8M seed funding round in January, also led by Index. Founded by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas (who previously built Nord Security and Oxylabs.io), nexos.ai removes barriers to AI adoption across security, governance, and cost control. The platform combines an AI Workspace for employees with an AI Gateway for developers, creating a unified control layer for over 200 AI models. As Index Ventures partners Bastian Hasslinger and Hannah Seal write: "Few are equipped to guide enterprises through all of this. Tomas Okmanas and his team are one such team." The reality is stark: enterprises have 12-24 months to architect proper AI infrastructure or face existential competitive disadvantage. As Tomas explains: "Companies follow the same journey – initial AI excitement, then they buy everything, nothing works together, costs explode, and they end up throwing most of it away." Bastian and Hannah believe the team brings critical advantages: "They bring deep experience of implementation within large-scale enterprises... they also possess a unique ability to operate in highly dynamic, fast-changing, competitive environments – and win." "nexos.ai is the kind of critical tool every enterprise will eventually need to implement and work with AI securely."

𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲. In 1913, Delaware made a calculated bet that reshaped the global economy. By creating a simple corporate structure, it became home to the world's most transformative businesses. Today, Europe faces a stark choice: continue with fragmentation, or create its own EU–INC. As I shared with Fortune (link in comments), the numbers are sobering. Publicly traded companies started in Europe over the past 50 years are collectively valued at around $420 billion. Their U.S. counterparts? Nearly $30 trillion, almost 70 times as much. The problem isn't talent or ambition. European founders have built Adyen, Revolut, Spotify, and many emerging companies are on path to go even further. But while a Delaware Inc can raise capital and expand coast-to-coast seamlessly, founders operating in the EU must navigate 27 regulatory systems, and explain to engineers in Munich why their stock options differ from colleagues in Madrid. There is no EU single market for startups, only 27 different countries. But momentum is building. The EU–INC movement has gathered over 18,000 signatories, from leaders at Alan (Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve), Mistral AI (Arthur Mensch), Klarna (Sebastian Siemiatkowski), Revolut (Joe Heneghan), Supercell (Ilkka Paananen), and Stripe (Patrick Collison), and approval from major EU institutions. European Commission's President Ursula von der Leyen has committed to reform. The danger? Brussels is already considering piecemeal, incremental measures. This won't work. Fragmentation must be fixed at the heart of Europe. Half measures won't solve founders' problems or create the competitive advantage Europe needs. The ambition should be clear: make Europe the best place in the world to start and scale a startup. That's why I'm backing EU–INC, and why Index is working tirelessly to turn this ambition into reality. Europe doesn't need another directive or committee. It needs EU–INC.

The economy runs on contracts. Every sale, partnership, and deal depends on one. So why do they remain one of the slowest and most costly bottlenecks, often consuming 1-1.5% of revenue? That’s the problem Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan set out to solve when they founded Crosby. They’re reimagining contracts from first principles, designed for the speed and scale of modern business. The model is deceptively simple: send a contract over Slack or email, and get back redlines in the same thread, typically within 70 minutes (not the 1-2 days you’d expect from traditional firms). AI agents handle repetitive tasks, while attorneys focus on judgment calls with more context, risk, and strategy. For sales and RevOps teams, Crosby is more than back-office support. It’s revenue enablement. Contracts are the last mile of a deal, and Crosby helps make the difference between closing this quarter or missing it. We’re excited to lead Crosby’s Series A and partner with Ryan, John, and their team as they bring contracts into the AI era.

We’re in the midst of a hardware renaissance. From EVs and drones to aerospace, robotics, and defense, the pace of innovation has never been faster. Every new car, drone, satellite, and smartphone requires custom electronics, with printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are smaller, denser, and more reliable than the generation before. And yet, PCB layout is still one of the biggest bottlenecks in electronics design. More than 90% of layout work is still done manually using tools that haven’t meaningfully improved since the 1980s. It’s slow, error-prone, and a drag on innovation, even at the world’s most forward-thinking companies. That’s the problem Sergiy Nesterenko and his team are solving at Quilter. The company has built the first fully autonomous, physics-driven PCB layout engine—a system that uses reinforcement learning to turn a schematic into fabrication-ready designs in minutes rather than weeks or months. Already, Fortune 500 companies across aerospace, defense, and consumer electronics are adopting Quilter’s technology to transform how their engineering teams design, test, and validate hardware. We’re thrilled to lead Quilter’s $25.5M Series B, with Nina Achadjian joining the board to work with Sergiy and his team as they tackle one of hardware’s biggest bottlenecks and usher in a new era of electronics innovation.

AI’s explosive growth comes with a cost: massive energy demands of data centers. These facilities power the next wave of intelligence, but at a considerable financial and environmental cost. Enter: Phaidra. Their intelligent agents make AI factories radically more efficient – helping the world’s largest AI players maximize the output of every watt of energy. Led by Jim Gao (who pioneered Google DeepMind’s work on industrial AI), Vedavyas Panneershelvam (a primary engineer on AlphaGo), and Katie H. (an operations leader with deep industrial systems expertise), the Phaidra team combines world-class technical insight with hard-won experience operating at the frontlines of compute and energy. They are uniquely equipped to solve AI’s biggest bottleneck: power. ⚡️ We’re delighted to double down on our investment in Phaidra, supporting their $60M Series B as they deepen their partnership with NVIDIA to build the infrastructure powering the future of AI.

Vlad Tenev was five when he landed at JFK and stepped into a new world. “I remember being surrounded by all these tall buildings, in this magnificent city,” he says. “I had never seen anything like that.” The only child of Bulgarian immigrants, he grew up under constant pressure to excel in school. After dreaming of becoming a mathematician, he dropped out of his PhD program when a call from his college buddy Baiju Bhatt changed everything. He fell in love with entrepreneurship, and together they founded Robinhood, changing finance as we know it. Over the years, Robinhood has helped a generation of investors take control of their finances, becoming one of the defining companies of its era. In 2023, Tenev’s journey came full circle when he co-founded Harmonic, an AI platform working to build mathematical superintelligence. It was that same love of math that he says first drew him to entrepreneurship: “You can take what’s in your brain and turn it into a product. And if you’re lucky enough and good enough, that product can be used by tens of millions—maybe one day hundreds of millions, or billions of people.” Explore more founder perspectives at indexventures.com

We’re excited to welcome Zack Urlocker as our newest Executive-in-Residence at Index Ventures! Zack has been part of the Index story for over two decades — from his leadership roles at MySQL, to scaling Zendesk and Duo Security as COO, and most recently serving as CEO at Gatsby, one of our own portfolio companies. In this role, Zack will be working closely with founders across the Index portfolio, sharing his hard-earned experience on go-to-market strategy, product positioning, hiring, leadership, and everything in between that comes with building and scaling world-class companies. We’re thrilled to have him on board — and our founders will be even more thrilled to work with him. Welcome, Zack! 😁

The audit industry is facing what Vidya Peters calls an untenable equation: growing demand and shrinking supply. As regulations increase and businesses become more complex, fewer people are joining the profession, and those who do often burn out under the heavy manual workload. DataSnipper solves this by using AI to automate the heavy lifting of data verification. As “Snipping” becomes the new “Googling” for auditors, it’s spreading through the industry like wildfire—trusted by the Big Four and used by more than 500,000 auditors in 177 countries worldwide. Index partner Hannah Seal caught up with Vidya to talk about DataSnipper’s incredible word-of-mouth rise, the responsibility auditors continue to hold even with the rise of AI, and the urgent need for technology to solve the biggest problems facing the profession today.