Stefan Gabriel, the former head of corporate venturing unit 3M Ventures, hosted a panel discussion at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium yesterday on interesting data which may seem puzzling at first glance but are in line with common sense.
Participants on the panel were Toby Lewis, chief analytics officer of GCV Analytics, and Douglas Trafelet, managing director of private equity and venture capital database PitchBook Data.
Lewis noted that the total number of active corporate VCs has been growing over the past five years. The amount of money committed to investments have increased in parallel, and more rapidly, than the number of CVC deals.
Almost half of Fortune 100 companies make venture capital investments, according to the data, and Lewis said that for the rest of companies on the Fortune 500 list, having a corporate venturing unit becomes a matter of discussion on resources.
Trafelet commented that deals in Europe have been growing in both size and number over the past 10 years and that later-stage funding rounds tend to drive larger amounts of capital.
According to PitchBook data, corporate VC investors have already secured a much larger place for themselves in the overall VC funding landscape, with almost half of all venture capital deals in 2015 including some corporate capital.
Data presented by Trafelet also suggests that having a corporate investor in a given deal tends to a difference. Not only are deals involving corporate investors consistently valued 30% higher than other deals, exits with corporate investor involvement are consistently larger.
Towards the close of the discussion, Lewis revealed that his team have been looking to provide insights on strategic value to corporate VCs through a recently instituted survey. Findings from the survey will be published in a special report that will appear this summer.
– Photo of Stefan Gabriel courtesy of LinkedIn
