Venture firm moves into top rank

SpinX's products tap Swiss know-how in tiny plastic devices. Weidmann Plastics Technology AG

Swiss venture capital firm, Index Ventures SA, has closed its fourth fund at €300 million euro (SFr465 million), confirming its evolution into a top-tier early investor.

Its success in raising the fund when European venture capital is out of fashion gives credence to its new status.

Only a handful of early stage-oriented venture firms in Europe have been able to raise a fund of this size since the tech bubble burst back in 2000.

These include Paris-based Sofinnova Partners, one of Europe’s oldest venture firms, and Benchmark Capital Europe in London, whose European activity is comparatively recent and specialised in Silicon Valley investments.

Index, which has offices in Jersey, Geneva, and London, will invest the fresh capital in European life science and technology ventures, with a focus on identifying and growing early stage companies.

Over the past several years, the firm has invested in several university and research organization spin-off companies in Switzerland.

For example, Index backed the first round for Addex Pharmaceuticals, a Geneva-based biopharmaceutical firm focusing on central nervous system disorders.

The start-up company has raised more than $51 million (SFr59 million) in venture capital since founding in 2002 and now counts Sofinnova and Munich-based Techno Venture Management, as well as several non-European strategic backers as investors.

Spin-offs

Index also brought in international investors for a first round of investment in Innovative Silicon, a promising memory chip developer spun out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

It raised $6 million in a deal led by Index Ventures last March.

It was also an early investor in another academic spin-off, optical component manufacturer, BeamExpress SA, which raised $7.5 million early in 2003.

Insiders expect that an international syndicate will be found for one of the youngest firms in Index’s portfolio, SpinX Technologies.

The Geneva-based firm was founded by two former scientists from Cern – the European Organization for Nuclear Research – who are transferring technology used by physicists to detect photons, or particles of light, and then applying it to lab automation tools.

So far, the young firm has developed a prototype of a bench-top instrument that measures and reports enzymatic reactions called fluorescence polarization, helping understand chemical reactions at the molecular level.

The instruments are likely to be used in the first instance by the pharmaceutical industry to estimate the side effects and efficacy of drug candidates before the drugs are tested on animals and humans, but it also has an opportunity to develop in making diagnostic systems.

by Valerie Thompson