Where will the next billion-dollar startups come from? The tech world and most VCs tend to be parochial, looking at Silicon Valley, maybe New York, and a few other hot markets like China and Brazil. But what about the Old Country?
Yesterday, I was having coffee with Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures and co-founder of Seedcamp. He believes that in every major city across Europe, Russia, and Israel, there are “a legion of companies that are capable of achieving billion dollar valuations and in some cases are likely to be able to do close to a billion dollars in revenues over the next 3 to 5 years.”
I asked him to name five while I pointed my iPhone video camera at him, and he was able to give me a much longer laundry list , which I’ve added below (along with some others he sent me afterwards). I’ve indicated which ones are Index investments and where each one was originally founded. Which of these will get into the billion-dollar club? (Note that some of these already are billion-dollar companies. You can click through to their Crunchbase profiles to learn more about each one).
Skype (London, Index)
Playfish (London, Index)
Wonga (London)
ASOS (London, Index)
Mind Candy (London Index)
Net-a-Porter (London, Index)
Betfair (London, Index)
Klarna (Stockholm)
Spotify (Stockholm)
Wix (Tel Aviv)
Conduit (Tel Aviv)
Fon (Madrid, Index)
Privalia (Barcelona, Index)
Criteo (Paris, Index)
Vente-Privee (Paris)
SoundCloud (Berlin, Index)
LogMeIn (Budapest)
AVG Technologies (Prague)
Kaspersky Lab (Moscow)
Ozon (Russia, Index)
Yandex (Moscow)
Mail.ru (Moscow)
Saul is currently a Partner at Index Ventures. Before joining Index, he served as the global VP of marketing and e-commerce for Skype (purchased by eBay, where he is currently still an advisor). Prior to Skype, Saul co-founded and served as CEO for Video Island, an Index-funded venture that recently merged with LoveFilm to become Europe’s leading online DVD rental and movie download service.
Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information technology and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across US and Europe. Since its inception in 1996, Index Ventures has backed visionary entrepreneurs who have taken on incumbents and built seminal companies in a number of growth sectors including: open source software companies such as MySQL, Trolltech, Zend and Pentaho; broadband and VOIP companies such as Virata, Skype, FON and...
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