The least well-kept secret in corporate venturing was officially unveiled last week with Google Capital, the late stage venture unit of Google, officially announcing its existence with a blog.
The fund led by partners David Lawee, Scott Tierney and Gene Frantz said in a blog post it had “launched”, having been widely known to be investing since December 2012.
Lawee said in the blog ”Like our colleagues at Google Ventures, our goal is to invest in the most promising companies of tomorrow, with one important difference. While Google Ventures focuses mainly on early-stage investments, we’ll be looking to invest in companies solely as they hit their growth phase. That means finding companies that have already built a solid foundation and are really ready to expand their business in big ways. We’ll look across a range of industries for companies with new technologies and proven track records in their fields. Our investments to date include SurveyMonkey, Lending Club and Renaissance Learning—with many more to come. “
Lawee added in the post: “It’s still very early, and investing is a long road. We’re excited about what we’re doing today—but even more excited to see what happens in the years to come.”
In our July 2013 issue profile of the unit, James Mawson, the editor in chief of Global Corporate Venturing’s publishing company, wrote last year: ”The expected launch of Google’s later-stage corporate venturing unit will fill out the US-listed search engine provider’s suite of investment tools while making little dent in the $48bn in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet.”
Coincidentally the group was officially unveiled in the same week that Google was outbid by social network Facebook, which bought mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19bn. It will be interesting to see how the new unit affects Google’s presence at the mergers and acquisitions top-table.
Doubtless Google Capital will be one to watch.
— IBM Venture Capital’s $100m venture commitment to back deals related to its Watson super-computer, is arguably a fund commitment which is set to compete with Google Capital for Global Corporate Venturing ‘s new fund of the year awards at our annual Symposium on May 20 and 21. The use places corporate venturing front and centre in establishing a business unit at IBM – which if successful will put the asset class front and centre of the minds of corporate strategists. So it is with great pleasure that we can announce that IBM Venture Capital’s head Claudia Fan Munce is speaking on what the plans are to stimulate the Watson ecosystem at our Symposium.
She is the latest speaker to be added to the line-up, alongside venture firm Andreessen Horowitz’s Jamie McGurk, who will also be interviewing a soon-to-be announced corporate heavyweight. These speakers join the many great corporate venturing speakers attending including Intel Capital’s Arvind Sodhani, Microsoft Ventures’ Rahul Sood and Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap. See you there.