Corporate venture investing is moving into its next phase of growth, shared Nicolas Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures, at the GCV Symposium this week. And the industry needs better benchmarking practices to define what a good unit should look like.
“In ten years time, there could be more than 30,000 corporate venture units operating around the world,” said Nicolas Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures and chair of the GCV Advisory Board, told the audience at the GCV Symposium in London this week.
Global Corporate Venturing, the membership and events organisation for the CVC sector, tracked more than 3,000 active corporate investors last year, a record number and a tripling of numbers in the past decade.
“I personally think in ten years it could be ten times that number,” said Sauvage. Corporate venture capital activity has increased over the past few years, in contrast to the rest of the venture capital sector, which has slowed down since the covid-era boom and the end of the zero interest-rate era. More than half the dollars raised by startups last year came from funding rounds that included a corporate backer.
As Sauvage put it, in an era which is seeing AI compressing technology cycles and industrial transformation — involving everything from robotics to new energy sources — is becoming more capital intensive, “corporations cannot afford to learn about the future when it is already obvious. By then it is too late.”
Engaging with startups through minority investment or early customer relationships is increasingly the mechanism through which companies keep up with disruptive new technologies. This, as James Mawson, founder and chief executive of GCV pointed out in his opening speech at the Symposium, is “no longer a competitive advantage. It is competitive disadvantage if you don’t do it and you don’t do it well”.
Corporate venture has become table stakes for companies.
But as the influence of corporate capital grows in the startup ecosystem, so does its responsibility, and Sauvage cautioned: “We are not prepared for that growth.”
“I think we are at an inflection point,” said Sauvage. “Corporate venture capital is no longer just a bridge between startups and corporations. Done well, it can become an operating system for industrial renewal.”
Sauvage added that evaluating CVC needed to evolve from simply looking at how many CVCs are operating and move to “how many CVCs deserve to exist”. He also called for the industry to develop better benchmarks and codes of practice, involving an honest discussion of what good looks like.
Sauvage posed five key questions that each corporate investor should be asking themselves:
- Are we making entrepreneurs more successful?
- Are we translating startup signls into corporate decisions early enough to matter?
- Are we providing measurable value to portfolio companies beyond capital?
- Are we disciplined enough to survive hype, downcycles and corporate strategic changes?
- Are we raising standards in this profession or only optimising our own units?
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Maija Palmer
Maija Palmer is editor of Global Venturing and puts together the weekly email newsletter (sign up here for free).
