Annual analysis: 2017

Kaloyan Andonov, GCV Analytics, presents the results of The Global Corporate Venturing Survey 2018, our annual survey on the state of corporate venturing conducted in cooperation with Stanford University and Insead Business School.

The customer relationship management software producer launched four specialist funds with $250m of capital and scored big on the IPO exit front.

Tencent added huge private equity deals to investments in the likes of Meituan-Dianping, Go-Jek and Flipkart before a run of huge IPOs late in the year.

The Google owner committed big money to Lyft and Airbnb as GV increased its late-stage deals, formed an AI fund called Gradient and exited from Snap and Cloudera in IPOs.

The telecommunications group raised almost $98bn for its Vision Fund and dominated the tech VC space in 2017.

The upper end continued to grow and corporates launched a raft of AI funds, as bike sharing, real estate, smart vehicles and urban farming drew capital.

What were the most important trends in 2017?

Five companies backed by internet company Tencent raised large amounts in their initial public offerings (IPOs) over the past few months. It appears to be a bout of IPO exits that may not ended yet.