Analyzing the Investment Syndicate of Google Ventures

In March 2009, Google launched its corporate venture arm, Google Ventures, with a $100M capital commitment. Just three years later, Google Ventures has emerged as the most active corporate venture arm in 2013, amassing a diverse portfolio of companies covering everything from mobile messaging apps to bitcoin to genomics.

Google Ventures has maintained a fairly prolific rate of investment which has already paid off with some big exits for them. Since the start of July, Google Ventures saw the successful IPOs of RetailMeNot and Foundation Medicine as well as Monsanto’s near-billion acquisition of portfolio co. The Climate Corp.

In our earlier research, we explained that the largest VC tech deals are increasingly seeing corporate participation due to swelling balance sheets. And behind its growing number of investments both large and small, Google Ventures has developed syndicates with VCs ranging from the largest multi-stage funds to more recently-formed micro VCs.

Given the importance of network centrality in VC performance and the increasing importance of corporate VCs in the venture ecosystem overall, we wanted to dive into Google Ventures’ investment syndicate (note: this link takes you to their interactive investment syndicate dashboard) trends to understand its most frequent traditional VC co-investors and a few of the investors that Google Ventures seems to look to for dealflow.

(Note: This data and these visualizations comes directly from the interactive Investment Syndicate visualization on every investor profile on CB Insights.)

Google Ventures Investment Syndicate Trends

In April, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures teamed up to launch the Glass Collective for investing in the Google Glass ecosystem. And the data highlights Google Ventures’ tight relationship with both firms as both mega funds have been Google Ventures’ most frequent co-investors. In fact, as the year-over-year trend line shows, Google Ventures’ syndicate partnerships with A16Z and KPCB have shown a marked increase in the past year. A16Z has most frequently co-invested with Google Ventures at the early-stage (Seed, Series A) while KPCB has co-invested consistently across early and mid stage rounds.

Two micro VCs have also seen their syndication with Google Ventures grow significantly. 500 Startups, which recently raised a new $50M fund, has syndicated a number of early-stage deals with Google, including Vungle and Le Tote recently. Meanwhile, First Round Capital and Google Ventures have shared a handful of co-investments in 2013 including MessageMe and photo startup Cluster Labs.

Peeling back who invests prior to Google Ventures, we see Benchmark Capital in the list of firms involved prior to Google Ventures. Notably, Google Ventures has made follow-on investments into Benchmark-backed Uber and neighborhood social network NextDoor. Top micro VC Floodgate Fund has also backed several startups later invested in by Google Ventures including Egnyte and now defunct Milk, founded by now-Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose.