By Steven Scheer
TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Index Ventures has appointed a local partner to help significantly boost its already sizeable investments in Israel’s technology sector, officials from the U.S. and European venture capital firm said.
Index, which mainly invests in seed and so-called Series A funding rounds has named Juriaan Duizendstraal as a Partner based in Tel Aviv. In the past 26 years, Index has invested $350 million in 27 Israeli companies and firms with an Israeli founder but has not had a local presence.
“We have seen a lot of success so far and we are looking to just double down on the country and add support on the ground,” Duizendstraal said in an interview with Reuters.
Among the Israeli companies Index has invested in are Wiz, Slack, Figma, Datadog, Discord, Robinhood, Adyen, Elastic, Plaid, Roblox and Scale.
Founded in Geneva in 1996, Index is seeking to continue making investments in cybersecurity, infrastructure, development tools and financial technologies.
Duizendstraal noted that Index, which made one investment in 2022 so far, has not set targets. “Whether we find three deals or five a year, it really depends,” he said. “We want to invest more than we have done so far and just be involved in the (tech) ecosystem.”
Some 75% of Index’s initial investments are in Seed or Series A and currently it is investing from $3.1 billion in funds.
“It’s very important to be on the ground … We are chatting with founders that in many cases haven’t even left their businesses yet and are thinking about building a business. Those conversations are difficult if you are in New York or London,” said Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, another Index partner based in London.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
