In the first half of the year there were more than 500 deals, once mergers and acquisitions of portfolio companies and their sale or flotation are taken into consideration, according to Global Corporate Venturing’s database. See the main data graphs here, or our magazine PDF for additional materials.
There were 246 investments worth a total of $5bn in the second quarter, excluding 40 exits worth $2.5bn, and 222 investments in corporate venturing-backed companies worth $4bn in the first quarter, with 22 exits worth $1.4bn.
In the second quarter of last year, there were 273 investments worth $4.7bn and 42 exits and four initial public offerings (IPOs) worth an aggregate $29.3bn – $18.4bn of this included the IPO of US-based social network Facebook.
The US is the biggest region for investments and exits. Arvind Sodhani, chief executive of Intel Capital, the $10.8bn corporate venturing unit of the US-listed chip maker, gave a keynote speech at the Tiecon conference in May predicting IPOs would be “very strong” this year even if mergers and acquisitions (M&A) were the route for most exits. He said Intel Capital had 35 potential exits in the pipeline, the joint-highest number alongside venture capital firm Sequoia, according to data by CB Insights. Last year, Intel Capital had seven IPOs and 28 M&As.
However, while IPO activity has picked up in the US, particularly in the life sciences and enterprise technology sectors, the difficulty many firms face in listing in the world’s deepest capital markets has meant a continued source of later-stage funding rounds – series E and beyond – including online fashion provider Fab’s $250m round and energy provider Bloom Energy’s $130m.
Mark Siegel, managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Venture Capital, speaking at IBF’s Venture Capital Investing conference, said in the past decade private rather than public investors in venture-backed companies had captured most of the value from their growth.
Using data from Thomson Reuters, Siegel said since 2000, public investors had gained only about 10% of the value in these companies, compared with 90% received by private investors. This was a reversal from the 1976-2000 period, when public shareholders gained 70%. Siegel told Global Corporate Venturing: “We have also looked at [the data] several different ways – one, five [and] 10 years post-IPO – and it all leads to the same conclusion.
“In my opinion, decimalisation of stock prices has killed the micro-cap tech IPO market and is a huge structural problem for our industry. We are working through the NVCA [US trade body the National Venture Capital Association] to get this changed for small companies.”
While these changes could help exit rates in the future, for the second quarter of the year, M&A within portfolio companies has continued to climb by a third to 20 in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year (see article on Google Ventures-backed deals in the full magazine copy).
The most common type of corporate venturing investment, excluding undisclosed stake purchases, was series A round at 43. There were also 42 B and 22 C rounds in the second quarter, according to Global Corporate Venturing.
Asian activity, driven by rising gross domestic product and hence consumer and cyclical dealmaking in the consumer and media spaces, featured 33 deals, approaching the 45 deals in Europe, although the US continued to be the main area of activity with 157 deals.
Information technology was the most active sector with 69 deals in the second quarter, followed by healthcare with 47 – both sectors in which the US and Europe continue to be heavily involved. Media, consumer and services were the next most active, with 37, 31 and 30 deals respectively. Clean-tech and energy deals continued to languish.