One of the most regular expectations from corporate venturers is there will be more cross-sector collaboration and innovative ideas funded.
The poster child for how this can happen involves China-based auto parts maker Wanxiang, which has set up a $50m corporate venturing fund, Fenbushi Capital, which means distributed in Mandarin Chinese, in collaboration with Vitalik Buterin, the Russia-born, Canada-reared, Switzerland-residing co-founder of blockchain platform Ethereum.
Buterin is the technical person behind the Ethereum foundation promoting blockchain technologies and decentralized contracts. He is also working on a non-profit, Blockchain Labs, Buterin co-founded with Bo Shen, who also co-founded the decentralized exchange, or trading platform, BitShares, through his Invictus Innovations company, and Feng Xiao, vice-chairman and executive director of Wanxiang Holdings, the auto parts company’s investment unit, and founder of the Bosera mutual fund company.
And the three are all general partners in Fenbushi, which has backed Factom, Everledger, ZCash, Abra, Circle, Tierion, Gem, Otonomos and Symbiont, according to its website, and reportedly Ethcore.
Blockchain, best known for being the underlying technology of digital currency Bitcoin, is a cryptographic public ledger that enables verified, instant and low-cost transactions.
Wanxiang expects to provide $1m of funding in each of the next three years to blockchain research through Blockchain Labs, which was instrumental in the creation of ChinaLedger, an alliance of regional commodity exchanges, equity exchanges and financial asset exchanges.
In September, the Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang’s Blockchain Labs held a joint developer conference, Devcon2, and the second Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai, China.
At the conference, Feng introduced a way of using the blockchain to track car batteries and monitor their usage, as reported by CoinDesk, which could allow them to be lent out to car makers.
But perhaps the biggest project could see Wanxiang partner US-listed technology firms IBM and Microsoft to develop blockchain for a smart cities initiative. Wanxiang reportedly plans to invest $30bn in purchasing 83 million square feet of land as a foundation for its smart city project.