The Intel Capital Global Summit last week saw more than 1000 venture capital and startup executives head to Huntington Beach, California and provided a front-line insight into what Intel Capital, as the world’s largest corporate venturing investor, is seeing.
Many of the most important people in corporate venturing were in attendance both at the Global Summit and the National Venture Capital Assocation’s Corporate Venture Group the day afterwards. Global Corporate Venturing updated the NVCA audience on the latest trends it is seeing, although the event cannot be reported because it was under the Chatham House Rule.
There was much excitement among the conference attendees and across the world’s media over Intel Capital crowning Shubham Banerjee, the 13 year old founder of Braigo Labs, a braille printer company, as the world’s youngest venture-backed entrepreneur.
Arvind Sodhani, head of Intel Capital, when asked what his favourite investment of those he had just announced, said: “Judging from the number of queries we have been getting from television, the Braigo investment is getting a lot of attention. Yet we made 16 investments today and each one is very important to us and each one is important to the technology ecosystem.” Henry Wedler, a blind advisor to Braigo, said: “We will make braille accesible to everyone who needs it.” Banerjee, a highly self-confident executive and school boy, happily shared jokes with Sodhani and explained to Global Corporate Venturing he would be in trouble with his mother, also the president of Braigo, if he did not keep completely up to date with his homework while growing his company.
Braigo nabbed the spotlight even from Ariel Maislos, the serial entrepreneur founder of Israel-based data centre start-up Stratoscale, which had secured funding from Intel Capital for a third time. Maislos had been one of the senior team of Anobit, which sold to Apple for nearly $500m. A full round-up of the portfolio backed, starting off with a summary of the Braigo deal, can be read here.
Sodhani said Intel Capital had done 55 new investments this year with $344m invested year to date and expected to end the year with $355m invested.
Intel Capital’s executives were enthused by the changes going on in their sectors. Mark Lydon, managing director of Intel Capital’s internet of things group, said: “There is going to be an explosion in the internet of things with an estimated 50 billion devices coming on-line by 2020.”
Ramamurthy Sivakumar, a managing director of Intel Capital of its perceptual computing and Ultrabook funds, said he was more bullish about augmented reality than virtual reality in the near future, as it was more accessible to a wider range of users, while virtual reality was likely to remain most used by early adopters in the games industry, due to the alien experience. “Let us say you are shopping for furniture and want to see how it looks in your living room, you can now use a 3D camera to physically place the furniture into your living room. There are phenomenal use cases for augmented reality.”
Echoing Sivakumar’s enthusiasm for augmented reality, Rob Rueckert, managing director of the new devices and wearables group at Intel Capital, said: “The product I am most bullish on is glasses, which is what most people make fun of. The glasses look like normal glasses but make inferences in the real world. I think this will be the biggest change in computing in the next five years.”
Talk at the Summit even included legislation and politics. Intel Capital’s European managing directors Marcos Battisti and Marcin Hejka flagged to Europe’s media their concerns about a recent merger control review by the European Commission, in an interview accompanied by Sodhani. Battisti previously stated this case strongly and clearly here.
Sodhani said legislators should be wary of stifling investment. “We see investing as a very positive thing. You look around you and some of the largest growth in VC investing is coming from corporations. Any thing that gets in the way is something that impedes the flow of capital to innovative companies and makes that harder. Hurting that flow will hurt the innovation taking place in those countries.”
The Summit closed with a timely intervention by Larry Summers, former US treasury sector, who spoke at the time it had become clear his party, the Democrats, lost control of the Senate.
Summers appealed to moderation to prevail, and drive the US towards higher growth. Summers told the audience that the US is not an envy of the world “when growth is only a quarter of China’s growth rate”. He made the case that the country should harness should make structural reforms to harness the technological progress that was being achieved by many of the Summit’s attendees.
In the wide-ranging speech, Summers flagged obstacles to innovation, perhaps the spirit of which is capture by a nice sentence on a perverse fact about US biotech funding. Summers said: “When Watson discovered the structure of DNA he was 27. In the US, the average first grant is at 42. That makes no sense.”
The worrying political discourse sat in stark contrast to the prevailing technological optimism of the rest of the event, yet given the progress in the air, such difficulties were taken in the spirit of challenge rather than lament.