The seventh annual Global Corporate Venturing awards are the first to be hosted in Hong Kong rather than London but reflect the changing face of the venture industry as it both globalises and scales up.
From a US-dominated cottage industry of relatively small funds, the provision of innovation capital to fast-growing entrepreneurial businesses is being transformed in less than a decade by a relative handful of global corporations, with Japan-based SoftBank raising $93bn in the first tranches of its London-headquartered Vision Fund a totem for the new world order.
Entrepreneurs anywhere in the world want the same things – capital, customers, finding and retaining the best staff, support in using research to develop the next generation of products and services and help with an eventual exit either on a stock market or to a trade buyer.
Speed, capital and support really make a difference when allied to the best and brightest entrepreneurs. The winners in this year’s GCV Asia Congress awards reflect this.
As Jeffrey Li, managing partner at Tencent Investment, which won multiple awards this year, said of one of its investees, once Mobike’s business model was shown to be effective, it was crucial to make sure the company had enough capital to compete. “In China, speed is everything,” he told GCV reporter Chris Torney, who wrote the winners’ profiles.
Li added: “We could see that Mobike’s business model was proven and the management team have a very strong CEO in Davis Wang. So I think that was the right time to make the investment.”
One of the keys to Mobike’s success, Li said, was the fact that it was able to use Tencent’s platform to provide customers with access to its bike-sharing platform without having to download a dedicated app. “That reduced a lot of the churn rate from the app downloading and other associated problems, which in turn helped them become one of the most popular services.”
It is a model closely watched and followed by others.
Congratulations to all the winners and shortlisted candidates, and let us know how we, as a trade paper, can better cover and support this industry over the next 12 months.
GCV awards shortlist – winners in bold
Unit of the year
GV
Salesforce Ventures
Microsoft Ventures
Alibaba
SoftBank
Intel Capital
GE Ventures
New entrant of the year
Honeywell
CloudFlare
AT&T
Boeing Horizon X
Henkel
Aflac
UCar
DB Ventures
Mail.ru
Ananda Development
Fund of the year
Baidu Ventures/Capital
Microsoft Ventures
Microsoft’s MSW Capital (in Brazil)
IPO of the year
Snap
Meitu
Cloudera
MuleSoft
Line
Twilio
Delivery Hero
Mersana
G1 Therapeutics
Alteryx
ObsEva
Quantenna
Myovant
M&A of the year
UberChina
Lattice Data
AppDynamics
Dollar Shave Club
Large investment of the year
Airbnb series F
Lyft series G
Mid-sized investment of the year
Ofo series C
Sigfox series E
Sub-$50m investment of the year
Cirius
Rover