Consumer

IDG Ventures is joining other corporate venturing units with an investment remit in Asia to secure high-growth investment opportunities in the mobile and internet application software sector. However, IDG's latest re-investment in China-based mobile app security service provider, Bangcle, is onto something bigger: safeguarding application developers and their customers.

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 Alibaba ventures into the social media and social commerce segments of its investment portfolio, a $586m investment into Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter seems bang on target to its corporate strategy, which is to have greater access to user data and buying trends across Alibaba e-commerce platforms and other future e-marketplaces.

Japanese corporate fund, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, has linked up in a reported $5m co-investment deal with advertising agency Digital Advertising Consortium, to take advantage of one of the latest retail and social media apps to be launched on the Japanese market, Origami.

Alongside Qualcomm Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners, both new investors in Pelican, in the round were venture capital firms Globespan Capital Partners, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and IQT.

QualySense is testing its QSorter Explorer with multinational companies.