Following on from the success of last year GCV SHIFT, a conference designed to discuss the new normal of CVCs working with traditional VCs as both direct and indirect investors, Global Corporate Venturing is now about to hold the freshly branded Synergize on October 26 in New York City.
GCV Analytics has tracked over 1300 funding initiatives backed by corporate investors over the past six years. Those include newly launched venturing units of corporations, traditional VC funds with corporate limited partners (LPs), accelerators, incubators and other initiatives (e.g. innovation labs, co-working spaces etc.) One noticeable trend, as illustrated by the bar chart below, is the fact that the total number of such initiatives has been consistently going up: from 141 in 2011 to 334 in 2016, or a more than 100% increase. This is true also for the two largest and most important sub-categories newly launched CVC units and VC funds with corporate LPs. In terms of the total dollars in such initiatives, 2016 marked the record because of the $93bn SoftBank Vision Fund.
