100+ Technology Startups With Corporate Development Groups

As we build Mosaic, we’ve been interested in identifying signals of company strength or stress and one that we look for is the additions or departures of certain key positions or departments at organizations.  One such interesting signal is when startups reach the point where they can actively pursue acquisitions, they often bring on corporate development teams to source, manage and close such deals.  Because the addition of a corp dev team signals a certain level of growth and confidence for a startup, we wanted to look at how many tech startups currently have corp dev folks and dive into some stats about companies with these teams as its clear that having a team focused on corporate M&A is no longer just something for the Fortune 500.

Using the CB Insights People Search capability, we compiled a list of 108 companies that received venture funding in the last two years and which have corporate development teams. Companies with corporate development teams have raised $86M on average and a median amount of $38M across an average of four funding rounds.
As shown below, the large majority of companies with corporate development roles fall into the Internet software and services industry, followed by mobile software and then e-commerce.  The diversity is significant as companies range from Apptio to Cloudera to Twitter.

Not surprisingly, California leads with the most startup companies having corporate development groups. Interestingly, California also was home to a number of corp dev executives from companies headquartered elsewhere such as France-based Criteo and New York-based Return Path.  While not located in Cali, it seems many companies have their corporate development teams in Cali in satellite offices as that is where the proverbial magic often happens.  Both New York and Washington also contained 10 or more companies with corporate development teams.