Index Ventures

"Support is no longer just about closing tickets – it’s about building long-term relationships. The migration to collaborative, real-time channels is changing the way businesses interact with customers. Plain is the platform designed for this new reality, helping companies deliver support that’s fast, effective, and aligned with their customers’ needs."

"With the adoption of AI in creative tools, the amount of creative work is now growing by 30% a year. For example, last year, more photographs were generated than have ever been taken by human photographers. So, we’ve been asking ourselves ‘what infrastructure is going to be needed to manage this volume of work?’. One problem that doesn’t scale well is issue checking – there’s no Grammarly for creative work and to date this tedious work is still done by eye. Beyond issue checking, we believe AI provides creatives with insights akin to accessing a panel of experts. We see the role of AI as enabling people’s creative processes, not replacing them"

"We’ve been deeply impressed by the execution and vision of Bogdan and the Apron team. They have created a delightful product for both SMBs and accountants, and we are excited to continue supporting them on their journey."

"The skincare industry is overflowing with false claims, celebrity marketing and thousands upon thousands of choices about how to care for your skin,"

"The fundamental problem we’re solving is context: Plain offers a single source of truth for customer interactions, powered by companies’ own systems and data – so when someone gets in touch with a problem, the company immediately knows who they are, what their order is, what’s happened so far – and can resolve it in a single click. Customer service teams are often left unsupported by their colleagues in engineering because traditional systems can be hard to integrate and build with. As a result, customer support teams are left to contend with poorly integrated tools, fragmented data, and disconnected systems. We’re designing Plain from day 1 with both engineering and customer service teams in mind, so it can be quickly and easily customised, rather painfully ‘hacked’ after the fact."

"Companies are under more pressure than ever to meet growing tax reporting and regulatory requirements as well as the expectations of stakeholders to show they are doing the right thing. Currently there’s no shared concept in how companies and regulators talk about tax, and no straightforward way for tax teams to be confident that they’re meeting all their obligations."

"Today, we’re in the age of ‘dial-up’ when it comes to business data."

"Mandating degrees, and making admissions officers the gatekeepers for great careers, means leaving out thousands of talented individuals,"

"The seafood industry is like this giant machine, with all these gears turning all the time at breakneck speed,"

"No enterprise wants to pay people to lose time to manual research and data entry. But they do. We knew there had to be a better way,"

"The way businesses engage with their customers one-to-one through sales and customer service teams is changing—and it’s driven both by increasing customer expectations and shifts in the way we work,"

"The market is one of the world’s most powerful tools against climate change. But we need reliable data to determine the quality of carbon offsets, in order to incentivize people to invest in the projects that are actually doing good – and to reward the project developers doing good work."

"In 2017, we set out to reinvent how people sell their cars, transforming a broken offline process by introducing a superior online experience. Our team has dedicated themselves to this mission through unprecedented times – enabling us to turn a traditionally lose-lose market into a win-win for our customers and dealer partners."

"Most web products will become a multiplayer experience in the coming years"

"It’s all very well to ask people to ‘shop responsibly’, but the reality is that consumers only have the choices that businesses offer, and it’s not fair to put the burden on individuals to constantly sacrifice cost and convenience."

"We built Sproutl to invite a new audience to take up gardening and give them the world-class eCommerce experience that digital natives expect. Our mission is to demystify growing plants and remove the barriers to getting started."

"The number of SMB-focused software products will continue to proliferate, and we expect many of these products to be powered by Codat in the future,"

"Changes to the way we work, shifting expectations of candidates, and the sheer pace of recruiting demands, have led organizations to rethink how they approach recruitment and retention. Enterprise talent teams are driving significant global transformation as they build towards this new future of work, and this investment will enable us to scale globally with growing demand and build the new category in enterprise technology."

"For half a century, inefficient offline processes have led to bad deals and a bad experience for both car sellers and car dealers. Motorway has fundamentally changed a broken experience where everyone ends up dissatisfied – and we’ve transformed it with a superior online experience where everybody wins. Cutting out the middlemen leaves both the consumer and car dealer with a better deal, all from home and without the stress. Our incredible growth so far is testament to our focus on delivering more value through technology – and this investment will provide us with the fuel to take Motorway to the next level."

"Finding a new drug can take over a decade in research, development and clinical trials, and requires thousands of experts working together with complex evidence,"

"We founded Sylvera because we believed that in order to reach net zero, the world will require a well-functioning and scalable carbon offset market. Such a market will only work if all participants can trust in the projects they are trading. Currently, carbon offsetting is a very opaque market with little independent assurance available to guarantee an offset has taken place. The market also lacks the transparency companies need to compare projects globally across different standards,"

"We believe the future of care for older people should be helping them to live at home for as long as possible through the delivery of personalised and preventative care. Birdie is already the partner of choice for caregivers up and down the UK, and this funding will help us rapidly increase the number we partner with and what we can offer them – meaning more people benefiting from more affordable, quality care. We’re proud of our mission and the values we embody to pursue it."

"Dinner parties, birthdays, date nights and meals with friends are never just about food"

"Gone are the days of fighting for online slots, damaged goods and disappointing substitutions. Dija is here to change every hassle we experience with the weekly shop. We are making this time-consuming and unsatisfactory experience simple, speedy and reliable. Dija combines brilliant execution with bespoke technology to create an exceptional experience for customers across the UK, freeing up their time and energy by delivering what consumers want, when they want it."

"The pressure on business leaders to deliver more change at a faster pace, and with more resiliency, is not new. However, the move to a distributed and remote workforce has made it ever more challenging. As a result, we are seeing digital transformation and the drive to move work from analogue to digital, rising rapidly on the C-level agenda,"

"The problem with benefits is clear: while they are meant to attract, engage, and ultimately drive productivity, the status quo doesn’t lead to desired outcomes. Our software platform allows companies to load funds and set individual spend rules on how these can be used. Employees are then able to choose from group benefits, such as private medical insurance, mental wellbeing services, or dental plans, while a real per-employee Mastercard opens the door to pretty much any product or service in a tax-efficient and compliant way. It’s a win-win: Employees get tailored benefits, and companies only pay for what’s used, take advantage of tax exemptions and preferred pricing, while streamlining the administration."

"We’ve been extremely fortunate in 2020 to accelerate our growth, strengthening our expertise in technology-enabled, customer-centric flower gifting. We’re privileged to have played our part in keeping people connected in this difficult period, and I’m proud of our growing team for scaling our operations whilst maintaining the signature thought and care we put into every order. With this new backing from General Catalyst and Index we start 2021 with renewed energy to pursue our vision of becoming the world’s leading and most loved flower company."

"Ontario Teachers' deep experience and credibility with global financial institutions made them a natural choice to lead the round,"

"We are thrilled to be working with Brookfield to accelerate our expansion furthering our mission to reinvent how consumers interact with video games. We aim to be the Netflix of Immersive Entertainment, with 1000+ units playing 100+ games in the next 5 years – working with real estate leaders like Brookfield brings us one step closer to achieving this."

"Lyle's unprecedented experience of building and scaling community-focused products will be vital as we undertake our next stage of growth in raising the bar in terms of product excellence as we enter new communities beyond fertility and motherhood"

"We firmly believe that digitally-enabled experiences will develop into a leading category in the entertainment space. eT has created a truly unique approach that has been very well received by initial customers. We are very happy to back this incredible team."

"This new category of work orchestration and observability helps turn complex sets of human and machine activities into well-orchestrated, repeatable flows of activity, enabling teams to go faster while causing less customer-facing incidents,"

"Today, if you want a great career the assumption is you go to university, but spiralling costs of higher education, lack of diversity in leadership positions, and a major global skills gap in digital and tech are all evidence that this model isn’t working,"

"The travel industry is underpinned by archaic software and processes that are fundamentally prohibitive for the modern day traveller."

"Our focus is on helping to simplify fundraising, and we’ve had an amazing response from startups who find the whole process quite painful. We’ve removed the complexity, unnecessary middlemen, standardised and automated the processes, and that has really resonated with both founders and investors."

"We exist because globalization is intensifying the business problems of trust,"