E632 | EUCVC Summit 2025: Charlie Hayward, Global Corporate Venturing: The Data Behind the $100B CVC Wave

0:00Corporate venture capital is now a 100 billion plus force in global tech and it's reshaping how innovation is funded But what's really driving the trend? Charlie Haywood from Global Corporate Venturing steps in to decode the data behind the headlines. Which sectors are heating up? Where is corporate VC making or missing impact? And how is Europe's CVC landscape evolving in the face of capital constraints and geopolitical pressures?

0:35Thank you very much, everyone. That's a lot of questions to answer in seven minutes. So we'll do our best. My name's Charlie. I'm from GCV, Global Corporate Venturing. This is going to be a bit of a different talk. Apologies. There's a lot of data slides. Who doesn't love a data slide? But actually, I've been very impressed with how the program's been formatted already this morning. So this is just a bit of a change of pace. I have spoken to Hepe and Zafir. Thank you for the invite, by the way. And this presentation will be shared afterwards. So anyone who wants to just dive into some of the stats that I'm going to show you, please come and find me or it will be circulated.

1:08GTV, just quickly, there's not really one word to describe what we do. We do our own events. We're very supportive of all the others that go on in corporate venture capital. Jim Mawson, our founder, set the business up 10 years ago, 15 years ago, actually, to basically just help the community connect. He wanted corporates, VCs in particular, to grow together. So we do a lot of data research, a lot of what I'm going to show you in the next five or six minutes. There's snippets from some of our latest surveys and reports that we've been doing. We also now do light touch advisory for corporates, and we basically do a lot of other events around the world.

1:43I will keep this short, but as I said, there's a lot of data that we're going to go through. If you want more of it, please come and find me afterwards. I have been timing myself pretty well to six, seven minutes. I'm actually doing four wedding speeches in the next four weekends, and I've been given eight minutes. So it was good timing. So basically, you guys are the experts. We're not investors. So first of all, please don't take what I say is gold. And don't come back to me and expect your investments to be based on a lot of this. But why does corporate venture matter for the corporate? We're just going to start with a very quick question.

2:15And some of you who know my CEO, Jim Mawson, will have maybe seen this before. Anyone want to just shout a guess, actually, which one is the odd one out? Sorry? No. Now, I mean, there are probably different metrics you could base different answers on, but the one I'm looking for is actually Microsoft. And the reason I'm signaling Microsoft out is because if you look at it a certain way, they're the only ones that didn't have corporate backers when they started. These are seven huge logos that everyone in our sector knows, everyone in our world knows. And they actually started through a venture clienting program with IBM, oddly enough.

2:48So just a fun little quiz question, example of why corporate venture matters, why corporate backers matter. They've created arguably seven of the biggest brands in our industry. I said some data slides to guys who are going to go into it. Just two pretty basic ones here. You have an active CVC unit, active being sort of metrics as more than one sort of minority stake investment. While the data points aren't massively different, they are quite significant for the corporate stock prices performance. You have an active CVC. The trends say you are outperforming your peers. And that's just one. So why does corporate venture matter for the entrepreneur?

3:26And actually, I want to talk a little bit more about this side of it, because we're all here for the entrepreneurs. That's why we're in the game. This is an interesting stat. More than half of companies that have CVC backers are less likely to go bankrupt.

3:44That's a really interesting point that I found from the reports that we're doing. We've been doing a survey at the moment. A lot of these stats are based, as you can see, to 2024. But my team have updated a lot of the numbers. to 2025 so far in the year. Guys, you know better than me that you've got so much value and strategic value to add to portfolios. But this stat alone shows of how we can continue to convince portfolios that CVC backers are really, really important. And as a general term, that's really interesting to see. But then you look at actually at the companies exit as a percentage of companies raising deals in the specific years.

4:18CVC is tracking pretty well. A lot of people have this old adage of financial versus strategic value that VCs and CVCs can bring. CVCs really can get behind the buck when we talk about the financial value that they not only provide a portfolio, but also the financial value that they can get back into their team. And interestingly, of CVC-backed portfolios, we're seeing that corporates can actually command a slightly higher exit multiples than their counterparts in VC. So some financial performance metrics there for you. Anyway, I was asked to just give a general state of play on CVC. So the next few data points are quite a lot about that, and we'll rattle through them.

4:55Activity in the market, it is active. There are a lot more CVC first-time fundraisers at the moment. We look at corporate versus total VC investments over the full of 10 years. Yes, fundraising has been difficult in the last few years. But when we talk to corporates, they take long-term views. And I think a lot of people see CVC as that metric. You take a long-term view here, CVC funding has obviously dramatically increased, investments have increased, and we're seeing them pick up a bit more. This is quite interesting, corporate back deals by size category. If you can see in the last couple of years, actually, the percentages of larger back deals are dropping.

5:36CVCs are getting more involved in early stage rounds. I work very closely with the likes of Nicola from TDK, Mike from InMotion. And I know that this is a big topic where, you know, generally speaking, they've been looking a lot more at early stage funds. Mike's done a lot of sessions at our events about seed, pre-seed. And again, this is just another one to show that top blue, dark blue percentage line, you know, where CVCs are getting a lot more involved in early stage rounds. And generally, CVC active investors, yes, bit of a boom 2021. But obviously, over 10 years, this is a big growth market.

6:09You guys know that. I don't need to tell you that. but we've seen it a lot in terms of supporting corporates and helping them get better at what they do. Taking just a step back and looking at the global regions, a lot of people talk about venture, obviously, with the North American dialogue, but where we're seeing a lot of growth at the moment, particularly is in Latin America and APAC, we did a lot of work there, and we're continuing to do so. If anyone wants a little bit more insight into how to capitalise on those markets, do come and talk to us, because we're working with a lot of associations and governments in those markets to get that better.

6:37Diving a bit more into specifics, this is again taken from the current survey that we're doing we talk about involvement of CVCs with the portfolio just some stats here that you know majority CVCs want to get involved with both board and observer seats but they're not necessarily stretching themselves in terms of aiming for financial performance metrics you know the majority of the people we've surveyed in the last couple of years aren't really expecting you know the VC returns that VCs expect And personally, there's no reason why we couldn't start talking more about that. We look at the program charters.

7:12Out of the guys we surveyed, you know, while slightly less critical for some, financial returns is still incredibly important. The three columns to the right actually talk about how CVCs see their program charters and what they expect to give to their corporates. And as you go through the horizons, it moves forward from a longer time frame. But generally, you know, CVCs we're seeing at the moment are all about adding value back to the corporate. This is a really interesting slide. I won't go into any more detail today, but do come and chat with me more because our data team have done a lot more around this and it's really interesting, some of the final metrics we've seen.

7:46Nicola's an expert talking about CVVD, supporting portfolio development. You have a separate team there and I know a lot of CVCs do. We see a lot more CVCs coming to us saying, how do we benchmark against other CVCs that are doing this really well? Obviously, it requires a lot of investment and funds and you can see here that typically the ones that are doing it well do have bigger resources behind them.

8:10This slide shows that actually more CVCs are active with parents who have over$1 billion in revenue. That isn't to say that CVC is a big boys game. A lot of smaller companies, and we're starting to work more of them, are taking LP stakes. And actually, this one shows that they still, more than a third of what the CVCs we surveyed, still hold LP stakes pretty successfully. And finally, we'll just look at, obviously, the mindset, you guys know this far better than we do. I looked at these stats yesterday from last year. The five bottom ones were a lot lower last year. We're getting a lot more involved in clienting, building, partnering, accelerators.

8:46The bottom one in particular in universities, we talk a lot with corporates. I think I've spoken to Mike a few at some of our events about this. A lot of CVCs don't know how to work with the universities. We do a lot of work with universities. That's something that we see as a really opportunistic market, but one that needs a lot of work still. We'll skip through that one. Finally, again, just taking more of a general view, over the years, CVC investments has increased slightly. That slide makes it look like it's still quite small. But actually, you look at the monetary terms, 40 to 60 % of CVC investments still come from CVCs.

9:20And that's really important, and that's really powerful. Lastly, on exits, we've seen exits drop slightly, but we are starting to see, particularly in this half of the year some IPO success. Got too early to say if it's a trend, but that's quite exciting to see. Anyway, I'm over time. I'll leave it alone. Thank you.