With the end of the annual GCV Symposium in London last week (May 22-23rd), it is time to quickly examine some general figures on corporate venturing, which we at GCV have been covering as a global phenomenon since 2011.
The growth of deal volume and deal value (as measured in total US dollars in corporate-backed rounds) have both grown significantly between 2011 and 2017 but at a very different pace. The number of deals has almost tripled (2.6x), while the dollar count has increased almost seven-fold (6.7x). This is partly due to the corporate venturers’ preference for later and larger rounds, at least according to publicly disclosed deal flow.
However, it is not only the number and size of corporate-backed rounds that have gone up significantly but also the number of corporate investors themselves, as the following bar chart illustrates. We define as “active” any corporate investor that has participated in at least one deal involving purchase of a minority stake, whether through a CVC unit or an M&A division. Since 2016, we have been tracking over 1100 such investors worldwide. How active are they in terms of frequency of participating in deals is different matter altogether, however. Only about a third of these investors can be called “regular” (i.e. that have participated in 11 or more deals for a given period of time).
Finally, these “regular” corporate venturers are in fact responsible for the vast bulk of corporate-backed round that we have historically tracked, as the following bubble chart shows. More than 10,800 deals – roughly 70% of all deals we have reported in past seven years – involved just 326 of the most active corporate venturers.
