Corporate VC co-investments show patterns of trust and influence

Corporate investors take part in around 20% of all funding rounds for startups, investing alongside institutional venture capital funds. Sometimes several corporate investment arms invest in the same startups in a powerful industry block — and frequently the same corporate investors appear side-by-side in several deals.

Cisco, Samsung and Deutsche Telekom, for example, all took part in the recent $750m funding round for AI chip developer Groq earlier this month, while in August six Asian corporations, including LY and Nippon Life all backed the seed round of an AI recruitment technology company, QLay.

Investing together repeatedly is not necessarily an explicit pact, says Alejandro Solé, chief investment officer at TechEnergy Ventures, the startup investment arm of industrial conglomerate Techint’s Tecpetrol division.

What it does likely show, he says, is a high level of respect for one another’s track record, as the presence of one of them might be enough to entice the other just enough to join.

Who an investor chooses to share a cap table with says a lot about the flow of money and influence. Over time patterns emerge – of trust, strategy, or backroom alliances that can influence what ideas get funded and which don’t.

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Looking at co-investment networks can give a hint as to who trusts who, who can help a startup fill out their investment round, and whose voice people listen to. The graphs below show some of that dynamic in action.

We’ve taken a look at four verticals – crypto/Web3, healthcare, IT and energy – and picked out some of the top corporates that have tended to appear in funding rounds with the same co-investors over the past five years, and who those most frequent co-investors are.

For each of the graphs, click and move any investor, and the width of the line between two investors represents the number of funding rounds they have in common for startups in that sector between 2020 and September 2025.

Crypto/Web3

Click and move any node to explore the co-investor network.

In the Web3 arena, Coinbase seems to have the deepest roster of co-investors. In the early 2020s the cryptocurrecy exchange frequently backed the same startups as Alameda Research – the now-defunct trading firm owned by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried – racking up 20 joint deals. More recently it tends to invest in the same rounds as stablecoin company Circle (with 14 joint funding rounds) and trading firm Jump Trading (11 joint deals).

Coinbase, Circle and Jump Trading all took part in rounds for startups like decentralised asset exchange operator Momentum earlier this year, as well as for digital wallet developer Msafe in 2023.

Hong Kong-based digital entertainment company Animoca Brands, meanwhile, partners even more frequently with other corporate investors. Crypto exchanges OKX, Coinbase and KuCoin are all high on its list, with nine, eight and six rounds in common, respectively. Animoca Brands and OKX – its top corporate partner – have collaborated on rounds for memecoin trading platform MemeLabs, liquid staking infrastructure developer Haedal Protocol and Bitcoin-native data availability layer developer Nubit, among others.

Crypto and Web3 investing is the arena of specialists and most of the institutional VCs in these investment syndicates tend to be crypto-native funds rather than generalists. Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Spartan Group are among the ones who feature prominently alongside the corporates.

IT

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is a prolific investor with several investment funds, so it is unsurprising that it has a large number of funding rounds with the same co-investors. These don’t tend to be other corporations, but rather large Silicon Valley VC funds like Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. When Alphabet does invest alongside other corporations, names like Salesforce (11 rounds in common), Nvidia (10 common rounds) and Intel (nine common rounds) crop up.

All three of them have shared cap tables in rounds for startups like AI-equipped application development platform Hugging Face, having taken part in its $235m series D round in 2023, as well as for AI research tool developer Runway’s $14m series C extension two months earlier.

By a similar token, Salesforce’s top collaborations are also with traditional VCs, with Alphabet, Nvidia, ServiceNow being it’s top corporate co-investors.

The biggest corporate investment partnership in the IT arena is between Dell and Intel, who have 16 deals in common since 2020. These include AI application deployment platform RunPod, high-performance server developer Rivos and cloud infrastructure developer Fly.io.

Healthcare

The myth that big pharma companies are reluctant to invest alongside each other turns out to be untrue. Eli Lilly, Pfizer, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer and others all frequently invest with each other.

Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Bayer all took part in rounds for Capstan Therapeutics – which also features Johnson & Johnson – as well as for autoimmune and inflammatory disease therapy developer Mozart Therapeutics. GSK and Eli Lilly, for their part, both invested in RNA editing technology developer ADARx Pharmaceuticals.

The largest corporate co-investor in healthcare, however, is not a pharmaceutical company, but rather a life sciences real estate trust. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, through its CVC Alexandria Venture Investment, has invested the most alongside VCs like Arch Venture Partners and Casdin Capital, but also has very strong partnerships with a corporate like Eli Lilly, with which it has invested in 19 rounds since 2020.

These include for startups like RNA-guided therapeutics developers Haya Therapeutics and Capstan Therapeutics, immune-mediated disease treatment developer TRexBio, as well as for Solu Therapeutics, a startup developing treatments for disease-driving cells in cancer.

Much like in crypto, the VCs that tend to feature here are heavily very life science-focused – Casdin Capital, Orbimed, Qiming Venture Partners, HBM Healthcare Investments among them.

Energy

The energy sector, on the other hand, has far fewer instances of big corporations investing together.

The largest collaboration is a corporate one between Chevron and Shell, which have nine deals in common. From there, though, the numbers seem to drop quickly, with the next largest on Chevron’s side being four with Equinor and Samsung – the same number it has with VCs like DCVC and Energy Impact Partners.

Shell and Chevron have in common rounds for startups including emission-free hydrogen production technology developer Aurora Energy and nuclear fusion startup Zap Energy.

Not surprisingly, there is a spattering of co-investments with corporates in the transport sector that have decarbonisation as part of their mandate. Shell has a couple of rounds with JetBlue and Toyota – direct air capture company Avnos and green hydrogen electrolyser developer Supercritical, respectively –  while Doral has multiple collaborations with Jaguar Land Rover, and Amazon has the same with Unites Airlines.

A portrait of a good co-investor relationship

One of the more prolific partnerships in the energy sector, relative to total portfolio size, is that between Doral Energy and TechEnergy Ventures.

Of the 17 investments TechEnergy Ventures have made, seven have been with Doral Energy–Tech Ventures (Doral Tech), Israeli renewable energy company Doral Energy’s VC arm. That’s no accident – what started as an investment in a startup, grew into a close and productive partnership between two units.

Today, they share the cap table of companies like clean hydrogen technology startup Tulum Energy, green metals technology company Helios, CO2-to-X startup OXCCU, renewable carbon fuel producer Aether Fuels, and grid energy storage companies Noon Energy, Peak Energy and Quino Energy.

It starts with strategic complementarity, says Solé. Both investment funds are focused largely on cleantech, but their scopes are different and they rarely feel like competitors in deals.

Pre-investment, the TechEnergy team brings a deep technical knowhow to the evaluation of new startups, while Solé says Doral Tech’s team can have, in certain places, better intuitions and better-developed capabilities to assess other parts of the business.

“The first part of every investment is a honeymoon without problems. When things get a bit more complicated, we’ve found in Doral a partner that thinks alike to us in many ways,” he says, emphasising their similarities in how to help founders through crises, neither lacking the propensity to stick it out when the going gets tough.

At the root of it is mutual transparency – about their own interests in any particular startup, for example – even when they are not aligned. Everything is up front and clear with no hidden agenda, maximising their ability to find a constructive solution.

At the same time, there is a clear understanding that not every round they look at will end up featuring both of them, and they won’t always be able to get the other into competitive deals.

“We both recognise that it is still a competitive landscape, where each has to fight for their interests and their place in a deal,” says Solé. “We both understand that’s the nature of the game”