Index Ventures Has Been on a Run. Now It’s Raising Funds to Keep It Up.

LONDON — When Adyen, a Dutch financial payments processor, began trading publicly last month — and nearly doubled its stock price on its first day — partners at Index Ventures had reason to cheer.

It was the second investment by the venture capital firm to cash out in a short time. Just a month earlier, the European mobile payments company iZettle was sold to PayPal for $2.2 billion, or nearly double what that the startup had hoped to fetch in its own initial public offering.

Index, founded in Switzerland in 1996 and now based in London and San Francisco, is trying to seize on the moment and amass more financial firepower.

The firm planned to disclose Monday that it has raised $1.65 billion for its two newest funds: $650 million for its early-stage investment fund, and $1 billion for a so-called growth fund that invests in slightly older companies.

Those figures are up slightly from the $550 million that the firm raised in early 2016 for its last early-stage fund and $700 million for the later-stage round.

The new funds, raised in a matter of weeks, are meant to help Index continue its recent roll, one that has impressed its investors.

“When you find a venture fund that we will back in successive iterations, it tends to be because they’ve figured out that formula or magic where they’re investing early in transformative companies,” said Kathryn Mayne, a managing director at Horsley Bridge Partners, which has invested in every Index fund since 2005.

To be clear, Index does not have the name recognition of Silicon Valley’s biggest boldface names, like Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins or Benchmark Capital. Nor does it have the firepower at the command of those firms: Sequoia, for instance, is reportedly raising $8 billion for its latest fund, and SoftBank’s Vision Fund has nearly $100 billion to spend. (Partners at Index argue that they are not interested in competing with those titans.)

And while Index has had a remarkable run so far this year — in addition to Adyen and iZettle, it was an early backer of the file-sharing company Dropbox, which went public in March, and the speaker company Sonos, which just filed for an initial offering — repeating that performance will be difficult.

But Index has come a long way since 1996, when it was founded as a way to import Bay Area-style venture capital to Europe. It has become one of the top European venture capital firms, investing in startups like Skype and the food delivery provider Deliveroo.

And since it opened an office in San Francisco in 2011, it has gained more recognition in the United States by investing early in startups like Dropbox. (One of its San Francisco-based partners, Danny Rimer, ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 venture investors from 2009 through March compiled by CB Insights in partnership with The New York Times.)

Still, among the big selling points for Index — both to investors in its funds and to the entrepreneurs it hopes to back — is its international reach and outlook. (Executives speak often of their staff members’ 17 passports and 20 languages.)

“What’s important is how fluent entrepreneurs are about their international opportunities,” Rimer said in an interview. “They have to win globally from Day 1.”

Drew Houston, chief executive of Dropbox, in which Index invested in 2012, asked for help moving into international markets, with Index helping to introduce the company to European cellphone carriers to create partnerships.

“We were really interested in global expansion,” Houston said in a telephone interview. “By starting in Europe, they bring that global perspective first.”

And Vladimir Tenev, chief executive of the online financial brokerage app Robinhood, said he regularly asks Index partner Jan Hammer, who gave him his first venture financing, for thoughts on political developments that could affect regulation of companies like his.

Meanwhile, Index said that its global perspective helped it recognize early the potential for Bird, one of the big electric scooter sharing companies. Martin Mignot, a London-based partner, said that the success of similar businesses in Europe persuaded the firm to be an early backer and take part in the company’s Series B round in March at a $400 million valuation.

Bird raised money again last month at an enormous $2 billion valuation, with Index again participating.

With the new fund, Index’s partners plan to do more of what they’re already doing: being among the first investors in companies, rather than trying to follow rivals into ever-bigger investments.

“We’re sticking to our knitting,” Hammer said.