The Art of Corporate Venture

“WeWork’s Bonkers IPO,” said Fortune’s daily newsletter. “The Weirdness of WeWork’s IPO Filing”, sister publication CEO Daily called it, adding: “If a recession is coming, the WeWork IPO filing… will be a fitting capstone for the peak.”

September started out with news on several life sciences companies about to go public as well as a large acquisition deal of another one of them. This space enjoyed a great number of exits last year and the trend appears on a path to be continued through 2019.

Fantasy sports platform Dream11 is reportedly aiming to raise a round sized at $500m to be backed by several corporate investors. The company is part of the broader gaming and eSport space which has seen growth recently.

Solar system provider Bboxx completed a round led by Mitsubishi. This year we have seen a revival of corporate-backed deals in the solar energy tech space, which registered a slowdown last year.

SoftBank-backed genome medical research tech provider 10x Genomics, previously backed by SoftBank, filed to go public. This may be a notable exit in burgeoning genomics and gene technology space, which has seen much corporate backing in recent years.

Several corporate venturers have backed IoT company Terminus Technologies in a $283m series C1 round. This nine-figure round comes to confirm an upward trend in valuations of such enterprises we have been observing for years.

Last year there was a peak in number of IPOs of corporate-backed emerging business, while the first half of 2019 hosted some much-awaited flotations like those of Uber, Lyft and Slack. We look at the broader picture for corporate-backed companies going public.

Rounds above $100m tend to be raised by companies based in the US and China. Last year we saw a record number of corporate-backed rounds.

Since the beginning of 2018, a fifth of all corporate investors whose deals we track appear to be newcomers.