Corporate VC Investments Hold Steady Amid Broader Downturn in Market – ABC Content Board

Corporate VC Investments Hold Steady Amid Broader Downturn in Market

Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com Inc., looks on during a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 20, 2016.

Jason Alden/Bloomberg News

Corporate venture arms invested more money in startups last year than in any year since 2000, the height of the dot com boom. Although venture capital investments dropped in the fourth quarter of last year, corporate investments held steady, said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights.

About 85 new corporate venture capital units made their first investments in 2015, including Twitter Ventures and Workday Ventures, according to CB Insights, which tracks financing to venture capital-backed companies. Overall, corporate venture groups invested over $7.5 billion in 905 deals to high-growth startups, accounting for 13 percent of all venture capital dollars invested for the year, and 21 percent of all deals, according to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Often these investments are of strategic importance to the company. Salesforce Ventures, for example, says it’s the only strategic venture fund focused 100% on investments in enterprise cloud companies.

The venture push from companies is a sign they believe that the adoption of new technology by their corporate customers is real, and that t

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