Congratulations go out to Intel Capital this week for breaching the $10bn milestone – that is the amount the US-listed chip maker’s corporate venturing unit has invested over its 20-year history.
There are two ways of looking at such a figure. First, it is the same amount as Intel Corp. promised at the start of the year to spend buying back its shares.
In that light, the Intel Capital figure is relatively insubstantial; a rounding error for a chip maker throwing off billions of dollars each year in free cashflow. It is this cashflow and profitability that drives Intel’s share price and analyst recommendations, rather than expectations for what it will be doing in three to five years based at least partly from the insights thrown up by its value-added investment division.
The second way is to see who else has achieved the milestone, whether an independent venture capital firm or corporate venturing unit. Intel Capital is probably the first to do so (excluding some private equity firms such as Warburg Pincus that can take majority as well as minority growth equity stakes).
This track record has meant Intel Capital has invested in more than 1,140 companies in 49 countries since 1991, with 191 of those companies going public and more than 250 being acquired. If practice makes perfect, then Intel Capital is pretty good – and was the recipient of the VCs’ Perfect Partner award as voted by venture capital firms in the inaugural Global Corporate Venturing Awards earlier this month.
Intel Capital, therefore, can take a great deal of credit for how ubiquitous and rapidly the information technology revolution has affected all sectors and offered opportunities to entrepreneurs to make the world a better place. (It’d be interesting to know how many jobs Intel Capital has helped spawn, taxes paid or portfolio company revenues earned over the years.)
The deals that took Intel Capital over the $10bn mark show the range of its interests: CrowdStar, a developer of social games on Facebook; iStreamPlanet, a provider of online videos; Music Mastermind, which helps people make music; and PerspecSys, a cloud data security provider.
Each investment is meant to help Intel sell more, and more powerful, semiconductors. Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital, said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires that data centres and cloud computing, handheld devices, consumer internet companies and security providers were the areas it was looking to invest in.
(I’ll be interviewing him this week for a profile in the July issue so let me know if you’ve any questions you want asked.)
So, the natural question to ask if who will be next to hit $10bn, and will anyone ever overtake Intel Capital for scale and success? Some of the VCs, such as NEA, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, are likely to be close but Asian groups, such as Legend or Softbank, are growing rapidly and if they remain as focused as Intel has been then they could get there, too.
As products become more interconnected and complicated, and alternative uses of cash offer relatively lower returns then the pace of corporate venturing is only going to increase – with Intel Capital bearing the standard for what can be achieved as long as hubris does not lead to its downfall.