How Hitachi Ventures built a billion-dollar CVC by thinking beyond investment

For Hitachi Ventures, investment is only a small facet of the corporate venture function. It is the deep connections across all levels of the organisation that turn a CVC unit into a genuine driver of transformation — from being a sparring partner to the C-suite to working with business units on more than 220 startup collaborations.

In this latest interview in Global Corporate Venturing’s CVC Titans series, Stefan Gabriel, chief executive of Hitachi Ventures, explains how the company’s $1bn venture programme has evolved into a strategic engine for one of Japan’s largest industrial groups. Having previously founded 3M’s corporate venture arm before being recruited by Hitachi in 2017, Gabriel brings a rare perspective on what it takes to build a venture unit that lasts.

Rather than viewing corporate venture capital simply as a way to access promising startups, Gabriel argues that successful programmes create value across multiple dimensions. Hitachi Ventures is designed not only to invest but also to influence corporate strategy, build partnerships between startups and business units, encourage entrepreneurial thinking across the organisation and help shape a culture of innovation. Those activities, he says, have helped earn the trust of senior leadership and secure successive fund increases to a total of $1bn.

The conversation also explores one of the biggest challenges facing venture investors today: coping with an explosion in the number of startups. Gabriel estimates that hundreds of thousands of companies are now relevant to Hitachi’s areas of interest, making careful thematic scouting and portfolio management more important than ever. Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly valuable member of the investment team, helping identify promising opportunities and dramatically accelerating market analysis that would previously have required large teams of analysts.

Perhaps Gabriel’s most important lesson, however, is that the greatest obstacle to corporate innovation is rarely technology—it’s culture. Building a successful CVC requires more than investment capital; it demands long-term executive commitment, organisational trust and a willingness across the business to embrace ideas from outside. Those qualities, he believes, are what ultimately allow corporate venture to become a bridge to the future rather than a simply a financial activity.

Watch the full interview below to hear Stefan Gabriel discuss how Hitachi Ventures has built one of corporate venturing’s longest-running and most influential programmes.