But as corporate venturing gains increasing attention in board rooms for strategic and financial reasons so the marketing or public relations around deals will also come into attention through public and regulatory scrutiny of large corporations.
Late last week, US-listed software provider Microsoft fell into the latter camp as it and AnyVision “agreed that it is in the best interest of both enterprises for Microsoft to divest its shareholding in AnyVision”.
AnyVision Interactive Technologies, an Israel-based computer vision company specializing in face, body, and object-recognition software, only in mid-June announced the close of its $74m series A round with M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture fund, as a new investor but the deal came under public attention for AnyVision’s alleged mass surveillance program in the West Bank.
From October, former US attorney general Eric Holder and his team at law firm Covington & Burling audited AnyVision and last week said the allegations were unsubstantiated by the evidence it saw.
Despite being given the legal all clear, for Microsoft, however, “the audit process reinforced the challenges of being a minority investor in a company that sells sensitive technology, since such investments do not generally allow for the level of oversight or control that Microsoft exercises over the use of its own technology.
“By making a global change to its investment policies to end minority investments in companies that sell facial recognition technology, Microsoft’s focus has shifted to commercial relationships that afford Microsoft greater oversight and control over the use of sensitive technologies.”
M12 and other corporate venturing units will likely follow the pioneering work In-Q-Tel (IQT), the US intelligence community’s venture unit, has done in actively examined the ethics of the technologies it can help develop through its portfolio. IQT commissioned noted academic Patrick Lin to review the applications for drones, or unmanned aircraft and as debates heat up on artificial intelligence and other areas of tools that can be used for surveillance and manipulation, corporate venturing units could be drawn further into the argument.
