Come have a pint with us, get to know our reporters in Europe, and network with other London tech startups. The Pub Summit starts around 5pm and I’ll be there co-hosting the event, along with our Berlin-based reporter David Meyer, as well as other members of the GigaOM team and our gracious sponsor Geckoboard, who will be buying the first round (thanks Geckoboard!)

The Pub Summit is free to attend, but you’ve got to RSVP here (if that link is funky, switch up your browser).

The morning after the Pub Summit (Tuesday, July 9) is also the Guardian’s Activate conference in London, which will focus on how technology is changing the world. I’ll be moderating a panel at Activate on how to fund the next phase of the web, with awesome panelists Techstar’s CEO David Cohen, Silicon Valley Bank accelerator VP Bindi Karia, Index Ventures Partner Saul Klein, and Ariadne Capital Partner Julie Meyer. Come stop by in the afternoon if you want to learn about web funding and say hi.

In association with the Guardian’s Activate conference, GigaOM is also hosting a cocktail party on the night of Wednesday July 10. We’ll have cocktails, appetizers and casual conversation between Tanya Cordrey, Chief Digital Officer, Guardian News and Media, Paul Walborsky our CEO of GigaOM, and myself on how technology has changed the business of media. Our Guardian/GigaOM cocktail party is also free but you’ve got to RSVP here.

Finally, these events next week are leading up to our annual Structure:Europe conference, which will take place on September 18 and 19 in London. Structure:Europe, like our Structure events in San Francisco and New York, will be focused on the latest innovation around the cloud and big data. We’re also highlighting a Startup Zone at Structure:Europe, and we’re looking for Europe’s hottest cloud and data startups to apply.

See you all in London next week!

The company says it wants to expand in to Europe and in to two new media – video and mobile web.

The money is led by Index Ventures along with Outbrain’s previous backers Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Index’s Dominique Vidal is joining Outbrain’s board.

Outbrain already opened offices in London, France and Germany this year and has already rolled out its mobile and video service.

It says it serves 3.5 billion recommendations per month that generate 200 million monthly content clicks.

Outbrain raised $5 (£3.2) million in 2008, $12 (£7.68) million in 2009 and $11 (£7.04) million in 2011 – each time, in a February.

The fundraising caps an impressive 12 months for Index, which has benefited handsomely from big money exits including Amazon’s £200 ($321.38) million buyout of LoveFilm and the $160 (£99.57) million (£99 ($159.09) million) public offering of patent firm RPX.

Bernard Dallé, a partner at Index, said the growth fund will help late-stage private companies “bridge the gap” between funding rounds and a share offer, as many startups postpone flotations amid the market jitters caused by the eurozone crisis.

He said most beneficiaries of the new fund would be London-based internet firms, but some would be “European-focused” US companies.

“So much depends on things beyond our control – the macro situation – that can shape the environment negatively, but there is an underlying current as we’ve seen with Groupon,” said Dallé.

Index invests in more than a dozen startups in London, including Moshi Monstors creator Mind Candy and music-tracking website Songkick. Dallé said a couple of European companies in Index’s portfolio would go public in the next 12 months, but the eurozone situation means it is virtually impossible to forecast how the market will look too far down the line.

“A number of our companies are getting to the stage where they are ready to go public,” he said. “It’s just a matter of making sure the market is more stable than it is now. In a much more predictable market some [of our] companies would have gone public now, but often there is an urgency [from investors] and companies don’t want to rush so they can wait for the water to be a bit less rough.”

The €500 ($689.4/£429.03) million growth fund is Index’s first new investment initiative since it raised €420 ($579.1/£360.38) million in 2007. Dallé said the majority of investors in the 2007 round reinvested in the new one, meaning that it was relatively insulated from a squeeze on private equity elsewhere in the market.

“You can sense the tension but most of the investors are long term so that has protected us from some of the wider chaos,” he added.

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

In a post on the site Arctic Startup, Ville Vesterinen, the CEO of Grey Area (and also a founder of Arctic Startup), says that the funds will be used to help the company extend into the U.S. market.

Lifeline Ventures, which had contributed to a seed round for the company, also participated.

Going west to markets where mobile social gaming is very popular, with a high-profile backer like Index, is a significant step for Grey Area to expand its business. Recent numbers from the app discovery and tracking company Flurry noted that 64 percent of all mobile social gamers worldwide are located in the U.S.

Grey Area released its first game, Shadow Cities, last year as a beta on Apple’s App Store in Finland only. The game cleverly makes use of the phone’s location-aware and mapping capabilities, to create a game where people play each other in their present surroundings.

The game, which is free to play but features options for in-game purchases, quickly shot to the top of the Finnish App Store rankings.

You can see how a game like Shadow Cities can develop with additional layers of functionality, such as augmented reality interfaces. But it already plays on the nexus of several important trends in mobile content — namely location-based services, social media and gaming.

Although this first game is only for the iPhone, the company will in future develop for other smartphone platforms as well.

If you want a better idea of how the game works, watch the video below:

In a blog post, CEO and co-founder Dave Morin says the funding will be used to hire more engineers and designers as part of its business expansion. The app is currently available for iOS devices only.

Path has not given out actual user numbers, but it says that its subscribers — who can share photos and videos with up to 50 “close friends and family” — have now shared two million “moments” through Path. Path does not give users the ability to post to Facebook and Twitter — which must be limiting its ubiquity — although it has now included an option for people to email their moments to anyone that a user adds to his contact list.

Path has an attractive pedigree, which may be partly behind their impressive fundraising, which is now up to $11.2 million in total, according to GigaOm. Morin was an early recruit at Facebook, where he worked on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Meanwhile, Shawn Fanning, another co-founder, was one of the people behind Napster.

With the round of funding come two new board members: Chi-Hua Chien joins from Kleiner Perkins and Mike Volpi come on board from Index. Dustin Mierau, a third co-founder of Path, will also join the board, which already includes Fanning and Morin.

Update: A footnote to the funding round, TechCrunch is reporting that Path apparently took the funding after it spurred a $100 million offer from Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which valued Path’s “design skills” and Morin’s Facebook experience. TC also reports that apparently 20 percent of active users use the site daily, representing a “Zynga-like” level of engagement. That’s perhaps where the value lies.

Its London partners Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi, the former CEO of Index portfolio firm Joost, will be running the office, Index’s fourth.

“There’s literally one of us in the Bay Area, New York or LA almost every week. But, we believe that venture capital requires true global focus,” Volpi blogs.

“While we’ve been encouraged by the progress we’ve made, we feel we can do a better job of supporting the entrepreneurs we work with both in Europe and the US by having a permanent presence in the Bay Area.”

Volpi says Index has invested in more than 58 companies which started in the U.S. and 35 European companies which crossed the pond.

Index investments include OpenX, Flipboard, Last.fm, Stardoll, Mind Candy, Go Try It On, Lovefilm and Sonos.

One of Index’s current main lines of investment interest appears to be cloud-centric premium and freemium services. It’s also interested in capturing places where people share their shopping habits and recommendations.

Volpi’s a former HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) senior exec, Rimer a former Barksdale partner and H&Q MD.

Atlas Venture moved its future focus out of Europe to Boston last year.

Fred Wilson and Mike Volpi, respective partners from the VC firms, are joining the startup’s board. The investment is unquantified.

Started by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, the site last raised a €2.5 million first round, led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, in April 2009.

It lets users record or upload audio to the site. This has mostly been targeted at musicians, and in particular electronic musicians, for composition collaboration. But the new investors say the site could be used for poetry or any audio.

SoundCloud has recently been releasing well-received mobile apps, and it aims to work as an audio hosting platform for all manner of software. It’s a classic freemium model.

“There hasn’t been an obvious platform for hosting and sharing audio,” Wilson says. “The web is still too quiet.”

Thoughts on SoundCloud by fredwilson. Uploaded with SoundCloud Android

Mike Volpi Audio Blog on Friday morning by mvolpi. Uploaded with SoundCloud iPhone

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Chartbeat says it has 2,500 paying customers, including Gawker Media, the Chicago Tribune and DailyKos. The new funding round was led by Index Ventures. Other investors include O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Lowercase Capital and Jason Calacanis.

Previous backers Accel and Hubert Burda Media joined Index in this round, which brings Etsy’s all-time investment to an estimated $51.6 million.

The site, like an eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) or Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) for independently made and sold goods, claims to have sold merchandise worth $130.1 million in the first half of this year, and is profitable.

Index lately has been showing more interest in startups that actually make money from users, like with micropayments, rather than merely ad-funded propositions. Index investor Danny Rimer is joining Etsy’s board.

This round values Etsy at $300 million and the company says this year’s revenue should be between $30 million and $50 million, TechCrunch says.

Founder Rob Kalin returned after a stint with NPR to replace Maria Thomas as CEO in December.

Squarespace charges $8 a month for a basic package, which includes one gigabyte of storage and more than 60 “professional designed” website templates users can choose from. The company also has more expensive packages geared for businesses, which include additional storage and features. It competes with offerings from both Automattic’s WordPress and Six Apart’s TypePad. Both of those companies have raised their own outside rounds.

The company didn’t provide us with a revenue figure, but in 2009, when it made Inc.’s list of the fastest-growing private businesses in America, it said it had generated $2.2 million in sales in 2008, up from $270,000 three years before. In a blog post earlier this year, Casalena said the company’s customer base had doubled in size over the previous year.

In addition to Index and Accel, Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein also participated in the round. Klein, Index’s Dominique Vidal, and Accel’s Andrew Braccia are all joining Squarespace’s board.