The Whataventure Fund will build companies that corporates can gain strategic insight from and also invest in at later stages.
Austrian company builder Whataventure is inviting corporates to invest in a new €15m ($18m) fund that will build ventures which they can participate creating and coinvesting in.
The Whataventure Fund is headed by Matthias Hille (pictured), who created the venture building unit for REHAU, a German plastics manufacturer.
Hille says the idea of the fund is based on the notion that many corporates struggle to build a large enough portfolio of their own ventures because of a lack of resources. The new fund allows corporates to gain exposure to a dozen ventures in a particular sector, deepening the market insights they they can have compared with building only a small number of ventures internally.
“We offer them a solution where they can, with a smaller contribution, participate in building 10 or more ventures, which they couldn’t do alone because they lack the resources,” says Hille.
“The learning effects are also very limited when you only build one or two ventures in one topic area,” he says.
The fund’s corporate partners can co-invest in the ventures at later stages and would also have the option to buy back the companies at a later date.
A GCV survey of more than 100 companies globally that do some form of venture building found that most are staffed by fewer than five people and company building budgets are less than $1m.
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Corporations build startups on less than $1m budgets but struggle with staffing
See the GCV survey of 100+ company corporate venture building operations.
While the fund targets corporations that don’t have their own venturing units, it also invites CVCs to participate that want to gain deeper strategic insights into sectors which they can’t get from making small minority investments in external companies.
“Often corporates lack strategic insights into startups because, if they invest only 500k into a startup and get maybe 2% to 5% of shares, they are not going to get very close to the startup.”
The fund will focus on building ventures in three sectors. The first is creating digital solutions for multi-tenant buildings where there is a market gap for technologies that optimise energy use.
The second area is circular economy technologies which include software for tracking the environmental regulatory compliance of products through the supply chain, as well as recycling technologies in the construction sector.
The third sector is quantum technologies and its applications in the logistics industries.
Hille says the fund’s team are in talks with corporates and investors to build between eight and 10 ventures initially in either the multi-tenant buildings sector or the circular economy.
