Deutsche Telekom leads way into earlier dealmaking
Fourteen years after its launch, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture corporate venturing unit has started to navigate its teenage years.
T-Venture has invested in at least 10 deals and exited others, including Percello and Pelago, in the past 12 months, according to Global Corporate Venturing’s proprietary research. This is a similar proportion of activity to its dealmaking in 2008 and 2009.
As it has matured, T-Venture has started leading rounds and investing earlier than its traditional series B and C stages of portfolio company maturity, but is also concentrating on the links between its portfolio companies and its parent’s business units, according to Georg Schwegler, managing director at T-Venture, last year.
Partly to help this strategy, T-Venture has rotated its team with a managing director, Sebastian Blum, joining portfolio company Cooliris, while Bernhard Gold transferred from Bonn, Germany, to the US in July and Thorsten Claus moved from another Deutsche Telekom subsidiary to become a senior investment manager at T-Venture of America.
In making the move to T-Venture, Claus gave up his partnership position at Fundstorm, an angel and seedround investor that had done 16 deals in 14 months and made two exits.
Other utilities have been following T-Venture’s example in looking earlier stage to help entrepreneurs. Over the past two years Italy-based Telecom Italia has run its Working Capital project to support young entrepreneurs and leverage the internet and new technologies. So far, Working Capital received more than 7,400 applications, with 13 projects receiving funding, 29 scholarships awarded, and 36 still at the pre-incubation stage.
Working Capital has also started collaborating with local bank Intesa Sanpaolo’s Start-Up Initiative, a platform to select, train and research potential investors for start-ups and early-stage projects.
Meanwhile, France-based Veolia Environnement, the world’s largest environmental services company, has completed the first year of its Veolia Innovation Accelerator programme with more than 200 start-ups chosen, while Turkey-based mobile phone operator Turkcell has also set up an incubator.
In May, Turkcell also partnered the local Ozyegin University in an external incubator.
Berna Samiloglu, head of new businesses and entrepreneurship at Turkcell, said he was structuring the company’s corporate venturing unit and added: "It is very important for us to get in touch with brillant entrepreneurs with high-potential ideas at a very early stage, so that we development of their business and get the opportunity of having a partnership with them.
"Companies like Turkcell have a big responsibility and lots to do to develop entrepreneurship in Turkey."