Last month saw more than 66 corporate venturing investments and exits, including proposed flotations, according to research by Global Corporate Venturing.
The largest announced investment was $106m raised for clean-tech company Trilliant, which saw industrial conglomerate General Electric invest just before announcing it was setting up a $200m corporate venturing fund for smart grid deals.
Despite the deal, information technology was the most active sector by number, with 23 investments and exits. There were seven IT exits, half the total across all sectors in July, through sales to trade rivals as a number of businesses reached more than a decade of venture capital backing.
However, the media sector saw the most intense activity with South Africa-based Naspers agreeing a complicated deal to acquire a minority stake in venture holding group Digital Sky Technologies, in return for selling its stake in Russian internet portal Mail.ru, and Google was rumoured to take a stake in social gaming group Zynga just before Walt Disney bought peer Playdom for up to $763.2m. Disney’s corporate venturing division, Steamboat Ventures, had earlier in the year been part of Playdom’s extended $76m series A round.
The US dominated activity with 16 of the 66 deals based outside of America.