The CVC afterlife

We spend a lot of time worrying about whether corporate venture units will survive and trying to winkle out the secrets to how to give a venture operation maximum longevity. For good reason: the mismatch between the average operating life of a CVC unit (four years) and a normal VC funding cycle (10+) creates a clear tension.  

Corporate venture still struggles with a reputation for disappearing whenever a new CEO arrives, budgets tighten or corporate strategy takes a sharp turn. In conventional VC terms this is a disaster, an investor that may be unable to commit to the invest, wait, support, exit cycle that is needed to grow startups.  

Our CVC Titans series — which interviews leaders at units that have lasted 10+ years — explores a lot of the design and operating choices that can give a unit longevity, well worth exploring (TL;DR: autonomous structure and deeply-embedded relationships with multiple stakeholders are almost always key). 

But what if, alongside the quest for longevity, we asked a different question? What if we accept that not all CVC units can be long-lived? Instead of asking how we make every CVC last forever, we should ask: what happens when it doesn’t? 

Try for immortality — but just in case, make sure you’ve prepared for the afterlife.  

One of the best pieces we’ve run recently on this came from TechNexus, “The hidden cost of a stagnant CVC unit”, which made the point that stopping new investments does not make a portfolio disappear. Existing investments still have governance obligations, follow-on decisions, dilution risks and relationships with founders and co-investors to manage. 

In other words, a CVC can stop writing cheques without actually stopping being an investor. 

If a corporate decides to shut down its venture unit, what happens to the portfolio? Who manages it? Which investments should be held? Which should be sold? What happens to the relationships with founders? And what happens to the knowledge and networks the CVC has accumulated? 

These are not particularly glamorous questions. But they may be more important than another debate about the perfect CVC organisational structure. 

The same applies to exits. There is an increasingly strong case for corporate investors to think about liquidity much more actively rather than waiting patiently for the IPO or acquisition that may take too long for corporate horizons. Public listings accounted for only a small fraction of venture exits in 2025, while secondary sales are becoming an increasingly important route to liquidity. It is a different way of thinking about portfolio management, one that acknowledges that a corporate stake in a startup may be just a short but rich episode in the development arc — for both sides.  

And perhaps we should apply the same thinking to corporate innovation itself. Rather than imagining it as a series of permanent institutions — the CVC, the venture builder, the incubator, the accelerator — perhaps we should accept companies will likely cycle through different instruments as their needs change.  

What we need to ask is: how do we make these transitions better? Because the real tragedy is not so much the shift from one to another — it’s doing so in a way that preserves nothing of what was learned.  

All the more reason for me to make a final plea for all of you who have a venture building unit to take part in our survey before it closes at the end of this week. Understanding how these units are working and fitting in with other venture tools is so important.  

And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this: what should the CVC afterlife look like? 

This editor’s note was first published in GCV’s Blueprint newsletter, which tracks corporate venture news, key deals, new funds best practice and jobs.

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