For a while now, there has been a clear trend, for example, of hospital functions like patient monitoring, diagnostics, and other treatments being moved closer to the patients, even into their homes, which frees up space within hospitals, which of course, even before covid, have been dealing with huge capacity constraints. Many hospitals are operat…

The way we buy things has been changing. Supercharged by the pandemic, the digital and physical sides of the retail experience continue to merge, data analytics continues to play an increasingly large role in how companies target and sell their products, and the consumer journey is, hopefully, getting easier and easier. The post Why Cencosud Ventur…

Today I speak with two people who know a lot about getting stuff from A to B– Rose Chen, head of innovation investments and partnerships at supply chain and distribution company Wesco, and Hector Shibata, who has for over half a decade led AC Ventures, the CVC unit of coca cola bottler Arca Continental. The post Investing in a strong supply chain a…

With valuations down from where they were a couple of years ago, the exit horizons that investors had in mind when they made their original investment ended up being further away than they thought. The IPOs are still scarce, and M&As are still too few and far between, but investors still want exits. The post A booming market for secondaries appeare…

There are very few corporates out there that have two CVC funds, Toyota is one of them. Not only does it have an early-stage fund in Toyota Ventures, but also a growth stage unit in Woven Capital – which was previously investing on behalf of , as its name suggests, Woven by Toyota, the automaker’s next-generation mobility business, but has more rec…

For years now, people – myself included – have been waiting for the advent, in earnest, of plant-based meats. Everyone loves a barbeque, but not the meat industry’s effect on the environment, our health, or the treatment of animals themselves. Alternatives have been coming to the shelf for years now, but the same problems persist – the taste is not…

The story of the past year or so has been artificial intelligence and, in particular, generative artificial intelligence, or gen AI. Doesn’t matter what sector you’re in, or what countries you look at, everyone is trying to apply gen AI to their business, and investors are seeing a gold mine. The post Corporates underpin over half of all Gen AI inv…

Sopra Steria Ventures, the CVC unit of French IT giant Sopra Steria, has been around for half a decade. After a few years, however, the investment programme was not really yielding any tangible results. The structure was not quite there, the strategy was not quite aligned with the corporate leadership wanted, and the focus was too skewed towards M&…

Today’s show is a bit different – instead of a normal conversation, we’re bringing you GCV’s most recent edition of the Next Wave – our monthly webinar series that features panel discussions on emerging technologies and CVC best practices. The post The Next Wave Webinar: Venture building – how to avoid the common failures appeared first on CVC Unpl…

Despite their products being so ubiquitous anywhere you live in the world, and an integral part of so much of what we eat, the B2B egg, dairy and food sectors are among the least digitised out there. What this has opened up is a lot of space for startups to make a big impact. Schreiber Foods is one of the largest dairy products producers in the wor…

One of the most exciting up and coming venture ecosystems in Latin America is that of Chile. In an already innovative and fast growing business environment, corporate VCs are sprouting up left and right across the country, and funds are increasing in size. One such CVC, which announced the launch of its $100m fund late last year, is CMPC, the pulp …

Kerry Carter is an entrepreneur, executive and investor in the area of sports technology, who also happens to be a former professional athlete, having played in the National Football League and the Canadian Football League before making a jump to the world of business and currently sits as chief operating officer of Atavus, a sportstech company foc…

Most people think that the Covid-19 pandemic has a supercharging effect on digital health – while that’s certainly true of things like telehealth services, is it necessarily the case for the rest of the sector? Maybe not, according to today’s guest – but independent of Covid, digital health is a booming area. Joining me today is Bill Taranto, Presi…

The story of the past year or so, of course, has been an explosion in demand for all things artificial intelligence. Every company in the world is thinking about how their business, processes, or products can be improved with the addition of AI across all levels, and all are looking for applications relevant to them. The post Jung Lee & T.A. McCann…

This is a podcast that focuses primarily on the world of corporate venture capital, but as we look at corporate innovation more widely, is CVC the best tool available to bring innovation into a larger organisation? According to this week’s guest, Alex Mahr, co-founder and managing partner of venture-building firm Stryber, the answer is no, or at le…

If you’re a company in the industrial sector, you’re going to have a lot of waste. Industrial processes are massively resource-intensive, whether it’s water or other raw materials, and what you get out the other side is not just the finished product itself, but literally tons of waste byproduct that needs somewhere to go. What is becoming increasin…

Many CVCs, because of their parents’ core business, tend to have, for lack of a better term, high-minded or particularly noble missions – whether that’s saving the planet from climate change, or humanity from disease, or anything else that may in some way contribute to the saving of the world – but then you have some investor who just want you to h…

Innovation is moving fast across most sectors, but in healthcare we are really seeing how tantalisingly close we are to solving some of our most enduring health problems, and we’re advancing at a fast clip. We talk about the leaps and bounds that we’ve come over the past decade in treating and finding cures for notorious ailments, how patient selec…

The construction sector continues to face a number of massive challenges – skill and labour shortages, lack of standardisation, regulatory hurdles, and a massive carbon footprint, to name just a few. Zacua Ventures, the construction-tech focused VC firm launched last year by three alumni of construction CVC units, aims to alleviate them. The post J…

For Crispin Leick, managing director of EnBW New Ventures, a passion for energy technology came early in life, and was supercharged later on when he became a father and saw his time horizons change from years to generations ahead. As head of energy generation and utility company EnBW’s corporate venturing unit, Leick and his team focus on three mai…

Today’s show is a bit different – instead of a normal conversation, we’re bringing you GCV’s most recent edition of the Next Wave – our monthly webinar series that features panel discussions on emerging technologies and CVC best practices. The post The Next Wave: Functional foods – Investors are hungry for more appeared first on CVC Unplugged.…

What precisely is the role of a third-party CVC fund managers in the venture ecosystems of emerging economies? According to Richard Zeiger, general partner at Brazil’s MSW Capital, it’s an important role to educate and set the standard. The post Richard Zeiger: MSW Capital appeared first on CVC Unplugged.…

We have plenty of knowledge hidden all over the place, with potential for transformational change on important problems, but without the ability to commercialise and spread it out, we don’t get to benefit from it. My guest today is Owen Thompson, co-founder and CEO of Cambridge Future Tech, a deep tech venture builder situated – as its name suggest…

IPOs are back! With the recent listings of companies like chip manufacturer ARM and delivery app Instacart, we are seeing the resurgence of the public markets after around two years of being dormant. The post Are IPOs back? appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

Cars have been on their way to essentially becoming rolling computers for quite some time now. They are better connected, increasingly electrified, and packed with features to make the driver’s life easier. Mike Smeed, managing director of Jaguar LandRover’s (JLR) venturing unit, InMotion Ventures, has been in the CVC business for only one year, bu…

My guest today is Cassio Spina, founder and lead partner of a new advisory and venture management firm Alya Ventures, which launched earlier this year. The post Cassio Spina: Alya Ventures appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

My guest today is Michelle Gonzalez, the global head of Microsoft’s corporate venturing unit, M12. She joined me to talk about the strategic shift that M12 has been executing since the beginning of this year to align the unit’s investments closer with Microsoft, as well as the ever-growing prospects of generative AI, the resilience of other vertica…

My guest today is Arthur Alves, corporate venture capital manager of Gerdau Next Ventures, the CVC arm of Brazilian steel manufacturer Gerdau. The venture fund was established in 2020 under in partnership with American CVC-as-a-Service firm Touchdown Ventures, and Alves was hired last year to fully integrate Gerdau Next Ventures into its parent com…

Increasingly, buildings are more than just bricks and mortar. Today they’re smarter, they’re more capable, they’re greener, and they’re continually improving. Few companies are doing more work in this space than Johnson Controls, and today I’m speaking with Youssef Mawad, managing director Johnson Controls’ CVC unit, JCI Ventures. The post Youssef …

My guest today is Jonny Crowe, a lawyer by training whose long career has been tied together by one central theme: executing and managing transformation. This is something he’s done both as a member of the C-Suite within the structure of an organisation, or in an advisory capacity, for many companies including Cinch, BCA Marketplace, Naspers and Ax…

Money, as they say, makes the world go round, and investments in financial services grew forty-fold in the decade between 2011 and 2021, from around $6bn to nearly $240bn. That is a huge leap, but according to today’s guest, Arvind Purushotham, head of Citi Ventures, it is only the beginning. The post Arvind Purushotham: Citi Ventures appeared firs…

Every successful business needs a strategy, and every business will need to innovate to survive. Strategy, of course, sets out long-term direction and intentionality, while innovation, by definition deals with new things, which naturally can be disruptive. So how do you moderate the two? Which of them informs the other more, and how? The post Debbi…

My guest today is Miles Kirby, CEO of Deeptech Labs, the Cambridge-based accelerator and investor focused, as its name suggests, on deep tech – which is of course an umbrella term encompassing a broad set of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum, advanced materials, other advanced compute, and just about any technology that has …

Setting up a corporate venture capital unit comes with a lot of hurdles. You have to deal with a wide range of stakeholders, and you have to find a place to fit within the wider corporate structure, much of which is not necessarily well-versed in the value that a venturing unit can bring. The post Mario Augusto Maia: Cogent Venture Partners appeare…

The scale and speed with which the venture market has changed over the past year has caused some whiplash for startups and investors alike. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in an environment with higher inflation, higher interest rates, and much more difficulty being able to raise money, be it equity or debt. While the current venture market does…

One of the interesting shifts that happened during the covid pandemic was in building things. Larger construction projects slowed down while at home DIY projects took off as people had to spend inside. This is but one of the patterns that Stanley Ventures, the venturing unit of Stanley Black & Decker, had a front-row view to, sitting on the interse…

Everyone needs to eat, and as one of the largest private companies in the world, Cargill has played a large role in providing much of what, at least in the US, shows up in supermarkets. But what does the future of food look like? And what innovation is needed to bring agriculture up to speed with the demands of a growing population with shifting vi…

Every business needs a space, but how will those spaces be valued in the future? Commercial real estate is in the beginning stages of some important changes in the way it looks, operates, shares its space, and even where it is located, much of the changes coming in the aftermath of the pandemic. The post Raj Singh: JLL Spark Global Ventures appeare…

Btomorrow Ventures (BTV), the venturing unit of British American Tobacco, is a CVC unlike the rest, in the sense that While the typical aim of corporate venturing is to complement and innovate on top of its parent company’s business, BTV’s main purpose is to help its tobacco producing parent to move away from its core product and into new categorie…

What does it mean to grant “unfair” access to a region? That’s what Wind Ventures, the venture capital arm of Chilean energy company Copec, wants to do for its portfolio companies wanting exposure to the Latin American market. With a wide remit that primarily straddles energy and mobility, Wind has been bullish on the energy transition and EV charg…

Spinning a fund out of the corporate parent’s umbrella can be a tricky process. If done right, though, you can end up with a situation where you can enjoy both the benefits of being your own outfit and the advantages of close operational links with a big name corporate. You can have your cake and eat it too. This is where AEI HorizonX, the venture …

There has never been a more crucial time to invest in technologies related to defence and security. War in Ukraine and growing geopolitical tensions between the US and China are bringing a new focus to an area that used to be taboo for investors. Global Corporate Venturing editor Maija Palmer talks to Ryan Lewis, partner at SRI Ventures and Tom Par…

The world is changing, along with the way we look at it and experience it – this includes a merging of the physical world and the virtual one. This “great convergence” forms the basis of the newly unveiled thesis of NGP Capital, the venture firm backed by Nokia. The post Paul Asel: NGP Capital appeared first on CVC Unplugged.…

Air travel is a notoriously hard to decarbonise sector. Next to heavy industry, aviation is the poster child for widespread carbon emissions. For United Airlines,… The post Andrew Chang: United Airlines Ventures appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

If it hasn’t already been clear for at least the past decade, there is certainly no doubt of it today: data runs the world. It… The post Andrew Ferguson: Databricks Ventures appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

I’m joined by GCV’s Kaloyan Andonov, an analyst and reporter who also happens to be a resident data guru, and has put together an extensive… The post Last Year in Data appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

Happy New Year! For our first episode of 2023, one thing is clear – defence is not a business like any other, for obvious reasons.… The post Dan Ateya: RTX Ventures appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

It is our last episode of GVR for the year! To close out 2022, we’re bringing you a recording of a conversation on one of… The post The Next Wave: Investing Beyond Earth – Spacetech appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

In all likelihood, you will be acutely aware of the energy crisis we are experiencing virtually all over the world. What you may be less… The post Oil and Gas Investment appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia

What does it mean for a corporate venturing unit to be independent? Is that a structural dimension or a cultural one? What are the benefits… The post Should CVCs want more independence? appeared first on CVC Unplugged.By Mawsonia