Index Ventures Brand Guidelines: A 1996 Geneva Firm, a London Base and a Hand Mark

A Geneva bond house and a technology arm.

Index Ventures grew out of a Geneva finance house. English Wikipedia says its origins lie in Index Securities, a Swiss bond-trading firm founded by Gerald Rimer in 1976. In 1992 his son Neil Rimer joined the business and started a technology investment arm inside it, the same article says.

That arm became a firm of its own in 1996. Wikipedia names its founders as Neil Rimer, David Rimer and Giuseppe Zocco. TechCrunch reported in September 2024 that the firm was founded in Geneva in 1996 and, in the words of the partner Shardul Shah, has expanded into a new geography about every ten years since. In July 2026 the same publication called it “the 30-year-old firm.”

It has long presented itself as European rather than as an outpost of Silicon Valley. In June 2014 Neil Rimer told TechCrunch: “We’re not US transplant VCs,” adding that it was not a franchise of an American fund and that “the founders of the company run it today.” The publication reported at the time that Index meant to focus on what it called its “core hubs”: London, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Stockholm and the Nordics, Tel Aviv and Paris. The fund it announced that month was its seventh early-stage fund, aimed at technology start-ups in Europe, the United States and Israel, the publication reported.

Geneva, London, San Francisco, New York.

The firm made London its base in 2002, English Wikipedia says, and began investing in Israel in 2003; its fourth fund, the article says, set aside 15 to 20 percent for Israeli companies. It opened an office in San Francisco in September 2011, TechCrunch reported that November, while its partners stressed that its focus remained on Europe. It opened in New York in 2022, TechCrunch reported in 2024, describing a wave of Bay Area investors expanding east. Its website now lists offices in San Francisco, London, New York, Geneva and Jersey.

After two decades of investing in both technology and life sciences, Index spun off its life-sciences business in 2016 as Medicxi, an independent venture firm, according to Wikipedia.

It invests at every stage. TechCrunch reported in 2011 that Index had set aside a separate early-stage pool, Index Seed, in early 2010 alongside its growth funds; in 2024 the publication described it as running global funds with a single unified team, rather than funds tied to one region or sector. The firm’s philosophy page says it works with entrepreneurs “from seed to venture to explosive growth.”

Its portfolio spans the Atlantic. In 2014 TechCrunch listed European companies it had backed, including Just Eat, King, Supercell and Zendesk, and in 2011 London investments such as Last.fm, Lovefilm and Moo, as well as SoundCloud in Germany and Adyen in the Netherlands. In New York it was an early investor in Datadog, the publication reported in 2024. The 2014 report also described Index as a heavy advocate of European stock-market listings, noting that its portfolio company Just Eat had been the first listing on the London Stock Exchange’s High Growth Segment.

In July 2026 TechCrunch reported that Index had first invested in Wiz, the cloud-security company, at the seed stage, and that Wiz had completed its sale to Alphabet earlier that year. The same report named Physical Intelligence, Fireworks AI and Anthropic among its artificial-intelligence investments.

Design and documentation.

Venture capital firms sell no products, so their identities rest on a name, a few lines of copy and the companies they back. Their websites can be strikingly spare. Sequoia Capital’s homepage opens on a single sentence, “We help the daring build legendary companies,” and Andreessen Horowitz uses its motto, “Software Is Eating the World,” as the tagline that runs across its site.

The founder is usually the hero. Sequoia describes the people it wants to back rather than the money it manages, and its ethos page lists “the creative spirits” and “the underdogs,” and both firms give over large parts of their sites to founder stories and to portfolio pages that gather the names and marks of the start-ups they have funded. Wikipedia noted in November 2025 that the a16z website listed more than a thousand portfolio companies.

Publishing has become part of the job. Andreessen Horowitz runs a podcast network of about a dozen shows, newsletters, a books list and a New Media team that, in its own words, offers “go-direct as a service” to founders; Tech Times wrote in June 2026 that its thesis urges founders to speak through their own channels. Sequoia’s site mixes partner essays and videos with its Training Data podcast. Essays matter too: Marc Andreessen’s 2011 piece “Why Software Is Eating the World” gave his firm a motto.

Place and name do the rest. Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where Andreessen Horowitz lists its headquarters office, has given its name to a book by one of the firm’s partners, Secrets of Sand Hill Road. Names are chosen with care: Sequoia says its founder picked a long-lived tree rather than his own name, while Andreessen Horowitz compressed two surnames into a16z, a short handle it now uses across its website address, podcasts and social accounts.

A hand as its mark.

Index explains its own symbol. Its website says: “We chose the hand as our mark symbolizing the humility, care and effort of entrepreneurs building their businesses. It also stands for our commitment to them as partners in realizing their vision.” The same wording appears at the foot of its pages, next to the three cities it names there: San Francisco, New York and London.

Its language centres on people rather than transactions. The philosophy page opens: “You might think VC is all about money. For us, it’s about people,” and adds: “Other firms invest in deals, Index invests in people.” It then lets founders speak, quoting the chief executives of Wiz and Roblox rather than citing figures. Its contact page shows the San Francisco office with a kinetic sculpture by the artist Reuben Margolin.

Its fundraising has been described in similar terms of restraint. In July 2024 the Index partner Nina Achadjian told TechCrunch that the firm had been “very intentional about the size” of its new funds and had raised them mainly from existing investors; in July 2026 the publication wrote that Index had refrained from greatly enlarging its funds.

For a design guide, Index Ventures shows how a firm can carry one human symbol across five offices and three decades. The lesson is that a quiet mark, used the same way every time, can do the work that louder identities give to colour and slogans. Compare Greylock, another early-stage investor, and Accel, which TechCrunch reported in 2014 sometimes co-invests with Index. For this guide we use an ink blue, a cream and a clay with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Index Ventures’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.