Index Ventures announces £1.8bln for start-ups, unicorns

The capital injection includes an £625 million venture fund and a £1.2 billion growth fund

Global VC firm Index Ventures has announced £1.8 billion in new funds, which it will use to supercharge startups and growth companies in the UK and globally.

The capital injection includes an £625 million venture fund and a £1.2 billion growth fund. Index Ventures plans to deploy a significant proportion of this in the UK, where it has backed a large number of UK unicorns.

Britain’s growth minister, Lord Livermore, praised the investment, saying: Boosting private investment into the UK economy is an urgent priority for our growth mission, so I very warmly welcome Index Ventures’ commitment to Britain and their vote of confidence in our VC sector.

It is great to see how private investment in the technologies of the future will create thousands of jobs so people across the UK can benefit, he said.

It comes after the Labour government yesterday announced it plans to launch a national wealth fund with £7.3 billion of state funding in a race to “unlock investment” in UK growth industries.

Index Ventures, which has raised a total of £11.7 billion since it was founded in 1996, has a number of offices including in San Francisco, London, New York and Tel Aviv. It supports firms from seed stages through to going public. British startups it has previously backed include Deliveroo, Revolut and Bloom & Wild.

The venture capital firm is bullish on the future for startups. It believes that rapid advancements in AI, a deep talent pool and proven hyper-growth playbooks are driving big opportunities.

Artificial intelligence alone will revolutionise virtually every sector of the economy and open up whole industries to venture that have remained virtually untouched, explained Shardul Shah, partner at Index Ventures. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have worked in hyper-growth startups globally and can transfer those lessons to the next generation of firms.