Corporate venturing dealmaking has been on a tear for more than a year. The frenetic activity is seeing corporate investors in venture capital arouse interest across the entire start-up world.
Market tremors do not seem to be slowing corporate venturing down – for now. Even amid turbulent financial markets, in August third quarter investment figures as of the end of that month, were ahead of any whole quarter in 2013. See our historical data on the number of deals each quarter.
Investment levels are reaching bumper levels. 2015 looks set to top 2014, which was the best year for corporate venturing globally that we have tracked, making it one of the strongest periods of investment for corporate venturing ever (our database goes back to 2010, and so it is possible corporate venturing activity in the dot.com era was even more robust).
As has been typical in recent years corporate venturing units Intel Capital, Google Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures are leading our investor rankings as of the end of August. Those that are climbing the rankings include Chinese groups like Tencent and Alibaba as well as US companies like Salesforce and Bloomberg.
The median size of rounds has been growing particularly fast at the later stage, with series D and E rounds seeing particularly pronounced uplifts in the amounts invested.
This is perhaps not surprising given the abundance of recently funded unicorns – young private companies valued at more than $1bn. Yet the increase shows corporate venturing groups are fighting hard to invest in many of these fast-growing darlings of the start-up world, and commiting huge sums of capital.
The US is an epicenter of significant activity. Corporate venture capital groups invested $1.6bn in the startup ecosystem across 232 deals in the second quarter of 2015, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.
This data, besides the Moneytree figures for US activity, was created using GCV Analytics, a new data tool created by Global Corporate Venturing, to provide access to it corporate venturing data. Should you want to know more, contact tlewis@globalcorporateventuring.com. Lewis will be speaking at the NVCA’s event in Sunnyvale next month to provide further updates on the trends GCV is seeing.
This article originally appeared on the NVCA’s Corporate Venture Connection, which sends out its newsletter tomorrow.