Index Ventures

Proud to see our portfolio recognized on the 2026 Greenfield Partners #Disruptors60, the list of the world's most groundbreaking AI startups, unveiled at TechCrunch Disrupt today. Congrats to Conduct, duvo.ai, Enigma, Glow, LiveKit, Parallel Web Systems, Revel, Scope AI, and Wordsmith AI, innovating across infrastructure to applications and shaping the future of AI.

Outside of software engineering, today’s agents are largely still tools inside human-run workflows. You prompt them, they complete a task, and they stop. Hone is building AI that owns entire business outcomes instead. Given a role like procurement coordinator or outbound rep, its Engine explores the company’s systems, studies past work, and writes its own skills and tools. It’s tested against prior decisions before going live, improves with every correction, and acts on events rather than waiting for prompts. They’re led by an incredible founding team: Moritz Stephan, Oliver Brady, and Carlo Kobe. Moritz was a beloved engineer at Cognition, where he helped build the core of Devin, led much of the company’s long-horizon agent work, and later served as Chief of Staff. Oliver was an early engineer at Harvey before helping build Mercor’s enterprise effort, earning a reputation as a talent magnet. Carlo is a Thiel Fellow who left Harvard to co-found Fizz with Moritz, then led the company as CEO for several years. As LLMs handle ever-longer and more complex tasks, we believe value will accrue to whoever owns the layer between the model and the enterprise. Together with our friends at Benchmark, we’re thrilled to partner with Moritz, Oliver, Carlo, and the Hone team as they build it.

We’re not quantum experts, but we are experts in entrepreneurship. And the Oratomic team embodies the traits that define the very best founders: the intensity, the conviction, the obsession, and the drive. For 30 years, quantum computing has been 10 years away. Error correction, the key to a useful machine, was expected to take millions of qubits. But earlier this year, the brilliant team behind Oratomic published quantum’s version of “Attention Is All You Need,” finding that a useful quantum computer needs only about 10,000 qubits. It’s a group multiple people have described to us as the “Avengers of quantum.” The co-founders include Dolev Bluvstein, who led the first error-corrected quantum algorithms; Manuel Endres who developed the neutral-atom arrays at the heart of that approach; John Preskill, one of the pioneers of fault-tolerant quantum computing; and Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang, whose theoretical work maps out what large quantum computers can do. Alongside them are Madelyn Cain, who has worked across experiment and theory to make error correction practical, and Qian Xu, who developed the high-rate codes that make it dramatically cheaper. Now they’re adding optical, mechanical, and software engineers to turn the design into a working machine. The chemistry is palpable: everyone is fully bought in and talks about the computer as a matter of when, not if. We believe Oratomic has the makings of one of the most consequential companies of its generation, with the potential to change how we understand and interact with the physical world. We’re thrilled to partner with them as they build the first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Our partner Martin Mignot wrote more about our investment in Oratomic. Find the link in the comments below 👇

Team messaging hasn't been meaningfully reinvented in years, despite being where the real work of a company happens: decisions get made, expertise gets shared, and increasingly, agents get put to work. Most AI-native tools bolt an assistant onto that mess. Ando starts from scratch. Sara Du and her team have rebuilt messaging around three layers: an agent execution layer governing how agents perceive and act inside conversations, a human messaging layer that treats composing a message and searching for an answer as the same action, and a memory layer that tags context at creation so it's retrievable later. Agents aren't bots at the edges here, they're first-class members of the workspace, with the identity, permissions and context to actually participate. Index Partners Sofia Dolfe and Sahir Azam met Sara last year and were struck immediately by her ambition and her instinct for product and design, sharpened over a decade building (she dropped out of Harvard at 19 to start Alloy Automation). Her combination of ambition and polish is exactly what's needed to build the connective tissue for how humans and agents will work together. We’re excited to support Ando’s $20M seed round and look forward to what’s ahead for Sara and the whole Ando team. https://lnkd.in/gS6QruW9

Is the old cybersecurity model breaking? Our partner Shardul Shah joined Rebecca Bellan on TechCrunch's Equity podcast to discuss the permanent, resilient need for security, and how enterprises should be thinking about it in the AI era. They dug into: 💡 Why defense must be continuous and machine-to-machine 💡 The growing case for AI-native security platforms like 7AI 💡 The cyber insurance layer (think Coalition, Inc.) every board needs 💡 How new entrants like NewCore and Frame Security are reshaping categories 💡 Wiz as a talent factory, spawning exciting startups around the world 💡 Why we invest early and double down on founders like Joon at Simile … and a lot more. Check it out! https://lnkd.in/gpgNvrbg

Congratulations to the Ferry Health team on their $9M raise! 🎉 We've been struck by how the team turned a deeply personal, frustrating experience navigating healthcare for a family member into a product that's already helping over a million patients get the care they need -- without the endless phone tag. Proud to support Mehul, Keyur, Andrew, and the entire team on this journey.