Why Index Ventures is bulking up its investment team in NYC

While online discourse would make it seem that venture has retreated to the Bay Area, with San Francisco being the most important place to build a startup, Index Ventures is looking to bulk up its New York-based investing team.

The firm is currently looking to hire another New York-based investor with plans to add three or four new people to the team within the next year, Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures, told TechCrunch. That’s an aggressive addition to the current 10-member team.

"For a venture fund, that's hypergrowth," Shah said, adding that Index is trying to “capitalize on the ecosystem here, and the energy we have as a team."

Shah said there is a lot to like about the New York ecosystem that is different from San Francisco's. While the Bay Area may have better density when it comes to engineering talent and venture capital, Shah said that New York has it beat in one key area: density of customers. This is especially true for companies building in the health or financial fields, he said. While a plethora of investors is helpful for early-stage startups, a deep pool of customers is what really helps companies grow sustainably. The city's diversity of industry is another plus, too, Shah said.

He added that it's also a natural place for firms to maintain a presence if they have portfolio companies or colleagues in both San Francisco and Europe. He added that European companies expanding to the U.S. generally set up shop in New York first, which is another interesting stream of potential deal flow.

It probably doesn't hurt that Index has already garnered a successful portfolio in New York. The firm was early an investor in some of the city's largest startup winners, including Datadog, which went public with a $7.8 billion valuation in 2019, and Cockroach Labs, which was valued at nearly $5 billion in its most recent funding round in 2021.

Index was founded in 1996 in Geneva and has expanded into a new geography about every 10 years, Shah said. The firm opened its New York office in 2022 amid a wave of Bay Area investors expanding east. Lightspeed Venture Partners opened a New York office that year as well. Sequoia opened one in 2023.

And naturally, this wave is mingling with a number of New York’s prominent, homegrown VC firms like $80 billion in assets under management Goliath Insight Partners and storied firm Union Square Ventures.

New York consistently maintains its spot as the second largest venture ecosystem in the U.S. Startups in New York raised $12.6 billion in the first half of 2024, according to PitchBook data. While significantly less than the $40.4 billion invested in California startups in the first half of this year, it's nothing to sniff at.

According to CB Insights' unicorn tracker, New York is also home to 122 unicorns compared to San Francisco's 182. There are, of course, dozens more Bay Area unicorns when adding in those in the greater area (Palo Alto, Redwood City, etc.). But New York has far more of them than any other locale besides Silicon Valley.

Still, New York's ecosystem does have a weakness: large exits. Datadog is arguably the most prominent startup exit from the ecosystem and that happened five years ago.

Index is ready to fund more growth.

"It sounds like people are going back like 20 years, like when they said Europe is a museum," Shah said about the current rhetoric. "To say that [venture capital] only happens on the West Coast, it's not accurate. It's not even close."