Top European VC Firm Raises More Than Half Billion Dollars To Prop Up Late Stage Euro Startups
As US acquisitions of European startups grow more costly due to falling US dollar, Swiss-based Index Ventures Tuesday announced it has created the first European fund to invest in mature, late stage, European startups. The fund raised 400m euros, or about $576m at today's exchange rate.
The goal of the fund is to invest between 20m euros and 50m euros, in mostly European companies, which are at a stage where they are considering being acquired.
"In many of these cases, investing additional capital and time in the business will result in a much greater long-term payoff and allow the entrepreneur to continue growing his or her company into a market leader," said Dominique Vidal.
MySQL, which Sun Microsystems last week agreed to acquire for $1bn, is one of the firms' portfolio companies. It was also an investor in Skype, which was sold to Ebay for $2.6bn. Index has invested in 100 European and US startups.
Betfair, and FON are among other hot investments in its portfolio.
But a falling US dollar and a devaluation of Ebay's Skype investment has created a poor acquisition market for European tech and life sciences companies, which are often sold to US corporations.
Index was founded in Geneva in 1996.The latest fund will be managed by "Index co-founder Giuseppe Zocco; Dominique Vidal, previously CEO of Yahoo! Europe; and Guido Magni, formerly the Global Head of Medical Science at F. Hoffman-La Roche."
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