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Google Ventures' fifth arrow in its quiver - helping its portfolio companies and their mergers and acqusitions strategy.

This is our first quarterly look at the European corporate venturing market.

Wider corporate venturing activity continued to be robust, although the month was down on prior periods. In April there were 64 investments worth $885m, 93 investments worth $1.6bn in the same period last year, and 78 investments worth $905m in March.

My trip to the Munich Network in March painted an interesting portrait of an innovative region.

As corporations become increasingly open to external innovation and many of their own executives become angel investors themselves, there is a great opportunity to help the nascent start-ups.

This is an analysis of the ten most active units and has attached the main data of our new quarterly reports, the first of which, a 12-page special, can be seen in full, in this month's magazine.

The corporate venturing unit of Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever has made plans to increase its assets under management with its latest $450m fund from its parent, Global Corporate Venturing can reveal.

Modern consumer corporations generally continue to pump out the kind of products that the world population simply cannot stop buying. Yet these industries, which have been brutally competitive, as well as profitable, since ancient times, are being transformed by a rapidly growing world population, where consumer spending power is truly globalising.

Corporate venturing investments slowed in March by number and value as exits were boosted by three initial public offerings. The slowdown in deal activity came as nerves appeared to creep back into wider market trading, as eurozone country Cyprus negotiated a bailout that involved haircuts for bank depositors.

US-based chip design software manufacturer Tensilica, backed by Japan technology companies Fujitsu and NTT, and US-based technology company Cisco, was the biggest sale of the quarter, in an exit to US-based chip design software manufacturer Cadence Design Systems for $380m. The biggest initial public offering of the quarter was the $108m raised by US-based marketing software company Marin Software.

The number of corporate venturing units, tracked by Global Corporate Venturing, has risen to 971. We examine their development.