How to create (and measure) CVC strategic value: Examples from TDK, Shell and Echo Health

Corporations invest in startups to explore new technologies and find new business areas. More than making money from these investments, they want to gain insights and find potential joint projects. The most successful corporate venture programmes make sure they have processes and team members dedicated to ensuring that the startups in the portfolio really connect with the various corporate business units — a so-called “end-to-end” approach to investing.

Liz Arrington, managing director of the GCV Institute, notes that there has been a growing trend at corporate venture units to set up these kinds of teams.

“We’ve seen over the past five to seven years the establishment of formal corporate venture business development, portfolio development or platform functions, which are tasked with an arm to drive parent engagement and to reduce the lead time to impact for investments,” she says.

Three corporate investors who have led such programmes for a number of years joined GCV’s recent webinar “Capturing CVC Performance with ‘End-to-End’ Investing KPIs“. Suzanne McLemore, managing partner who leads the business development team at Echo Health Ventures, Tjerk Joustra, business development manager at Shell Ventures, and Geetha Dholakia, portfolio programme director at TDK Ventures shared insights into how their programmes work and the methods they use to measure the strategic value created by their teams.

Echo Health Ventures

• A fund with approximately $550m under management, which focuses on healthcare innovation investing on behalf of multiple US Blue Cross Blue Shield healthcare insurance plans.
• It had 32 portfolio companies at the beginning of 2025
• The team invests across all stages of startups, from early- to growth-stage

How the business development function operates:

Echo Health Ventures has three main teams, each with around six or seven people. The operations team contains functions such as legal, treasury, general council and takes care of aspects such as valuations and board meetings. A strategic investment team, made up people with a financial background, handles the investments, from due diligence to taking the board positions at the portfolio companies. A third team, called Echo Health Advisors and led by McLemore, is made up of people with a background in the healthcare industry. They work closely with the investment team, both pre-and post-investment, to figure out how startups that receive investment might work with the Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plans.

“Every time a new company comes in, it is championed by someone from the investment team. But, there’s someone from my team that is assigned to each deal, and we take it through to its conclusion, whatever that is,” says McLemore.

“When we write memos, my team owns certain pieces of the memo, for instance, particularly around impact, particularly working closely with the investment team on what is the total addressable market. We serve those plans to stakeholders, and we write individual portions of how an investment could fit.”
McLemore says her team systematically assesses the impact that every investment could make — although for early-stage investments this can involve a lot of assumptions.

Then, if the deal gets approved, people on the Echo Health Advisors team are assigned to the startup, to help them navigate the relationship with the Blue Cross Blue Shield healthcare plans.

“We do a fair amount. This is why we hire people from the healthcare industry, to do a lot of value proposition work with those portfolio companies to say, if you’re selling into a large health plan, let us help prepare you and accelerate in those meetings. That really saves time on both sides,” says McLemore.

Beyond just helping startups sell to Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, the Echo Health Advisors team will also help them scale across the general healthcare market.

How strategic impact is assessed

• Reports three top-level metrics: financial returns, number of strategic engagements/contracts signed, and portfolio return on investment (revenue flowing from the parent organisation to portfolio companies).
• Tracks “attachment rate” (proportion of portfolios with at least one contract with a Blue Cross Blue Shield member company). McLemore says a 60%-80% attachment rate is considered good. Echo Health Ventures is tracking an attachment rate of 80%, at the top of the range.
• Regularly discusses impact analyses and case studies, especially as part of impact sections included in all investment memos.
• Pays attention to outcomes for members, the parent organisation and overall healthcare ecosystem, expanding into frameworks for societal/ecosystem impact.
• Storytelling is as important as pure numbers when communicating with the parent, says McLemore. “They’re narratives that need to be talked about, the intangibles that are really important. Did somebody win a deal because they were able to include one of our portfolio companies. Did the portfolio company help create a market in a new area.”

TDK Ventures

• The deep tech corporate venture arm of Japanese technology company TDK, established in 2019.
• Operates $500M in assets under management and has an investment portfolio nearing 50 companies.
• Invests in areas of deep tech including compute and connectivity, IoT, space tech, robotics, mobility. It also has a sustainability fund that invests in energy and sustainability ecosystems such as battery materials, battery processing, novel materials, renewable energy, materials, circularity, decarbonisation.
• The TDK Ventures team has 16 members, four or whom are in the platform team. The platform team is spread across San Jose, Boston and London.

How the business development function operates:

Dholakhia says TDK Ventures has had a business development team working alongside the investment team from day one, even when they were investing from the first $50m fund.

“Right from the beginning our setup has been platform team and the investment team,” says Dholakia. “Because TDK ventures is a separate fund — we are not investing out of the balance sheet, and our hiring also has been primarily outside of TDK — it becomes very important to have a dedicated team that can understand the needs of both the portfolio companies and understand the framework of the different TDK business groups.”

The platform team works in several different ways. They will look at startups pre-investment, communicating to TDK what the potential synergies could be if there was a collaboration. This assessment is very high level, says Dholakia. “[It’s] not really identifying exactly what a pilot or evaluation would be, or committing to such a such an engagement.” Nevertheless, it helps inform the investment committee’s decision on whether to greenlight an investment.

Post-investment, the team will help portfolio companies scale by providing marketing guidance, financial help and help navigating the relationship with TDK’s business units.

“We bring our TDK global teams and enable a Zoom meeting with the portfolio company. They discuss what they are doing and where they think they can work with TDK,” says Dholakia. “Our team champions each of the individual portfolios and take them through the end-to-end process.”

Dholakia says the team enlists many people in TDK to help champion startups in the portfolio.

“All the TDK business groups are, of course, busy with their work, so there has to be internal champions that are keen on engaging,” she says. Sometimes it could be the corporate C-suite or investment committee members pushing from the top, but it is also important to push at all levels. The team is experimenting with how to best incentivise TDK staffers to become startup champions.

“This year, we actually initiated providing awards to people that truly champion and go out of their way to help our portfolio companies,” says Dholakia.

How strategic impact is assessed

• Tracks the number of introductions between the portfolio companies and parent (400 so far).
• Assesses strategic value mainly through “team KPIs” and “individual KPIs,” focusing on the number of engagements (join development agreements, evaluations, commercial engagements).
• Has a matrix that tracks how each of the 50 portfolio companies is interacting with each of the 66 TDK business units, published quarterly.
• Emphasises strategic side benefits such as synergy, learning opportunities and societal contributions.
• Values the creation of platforms for learning and knowledge sharing among company and portfolio teams.

Shell Ventures

• The corporate venture arm of Anglo-Dutch energy company Shell, established in 1996.
• Invests in energy, mobility, emissions management, digital infrastructure, resource management, with a broad remit in new technologies and business models.
• Invests across all stages of funding, with a preference for series A and B. Will typically invest first cheques of $2m-$5m in startups.

How the business development function operates:

Joustra says the Shell Ventures business development team sits alongside the global investment team. “Essentially what we do is we look at how do we deploy these technologies across the group, either directly through our supply chain, but we also look at at introducing them to some of our customers.”

The business development function tends to come in halfway through the pre-investment stage, says Joustra. While the investment team is responsible for the investment process overall, the business development team will be in charge of the part of the investment memo that looks at how a particular investment might be deployed.

“We feel it’s important for two reasons. We can, upfront, align with the business, and see whether there is an opportunity. Then, once the investment is done, if it all goes ahead, we can hit the ground running. We get a very good idea of what that potential is before we do the investment,” says Joustra.

He adds that, even if the company opts not to invest, the business development team might pursue a commercial agreement if the technology is interesting.

Post-investment, the business development team helps the startup follow up on opportunities and find new ones in Shell’s operations as well as in its supply chain and with its customers.

“On a day to day basis, someone is assigned to be their primary focal point for that,” says Joustra.

How strategic impact is assessed

• Measures strategic value alongside financial metrics.
• Strategic value (“deployment value”) includes cost savings, operational efficiencies (OPEX/CAPEX), and increased revenue as a result of investment. When business units sign a contract with a portfolio company, it is possible to use some of its metrics and analysis as support for these calculations.
• Gives importance to proof of concepts for early-stage companies and contracted value stemming from deployment.
• Uses insights and storytelling to highlight qualitative impacts and value delivered to the business beyond pure financials.

Watch the full webinar replay below:

This webinar is part of GCV’s The Next Wave series of webinars. We run a webinar every month, alternating between advice for CVC practitioners and deep dives into specific investment areas. Details of past and upcoming webinars here.