Yesterday Google announced its move to launch a venture fund of its own named Google Ventures. By the looks of it Google ventures has a very broad investment philosophy. The google ventures site states and I quote “We’re studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care. We invest anywhere from seed to mezzanine stage and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.”
There is no minimum amount of funding outlined and also no geographies mentioned. But rest assured given that this fund is lead by Bill Maris who was the founder of Burlee.com, which he sold to Web.com its almost certain that this fund would be initially focused on the US markets. Also as their contact address suggests there is no presence in India.
Google has been known for acquiring startups around the world and has done very few direct investments. It has though been an investor in the Seedfund and Ventureast a seed stage venture fund in India. But this new launch of a venture fund should not affect that engagement as Google ventures clearly looks like a US focused fund.
Fund to acquire strategy?
Startups looking towards google as a prospective investor might be concerned on one issue is that Google may be the kind of investor that might fund to acquire. After all thats what it has been doing the last decade as acquitions have been the way google has taken to grow its multi billion dollar empire. Its very possible that google would have an affinity towards investing in startups and technologies that it wants to acquire at a later date. After all you wouldn’t expect a google funded company being acquired by microsoft would you?
So Google goes from search experts to VCs.
All the best Google, from Resultrix.
VJ
http://www.resultrix.com
Hey yet one more experiment let s see how far they can go.
Also as their contact address suggests there is no presence in India.
They are in 2 locations – Boston, MA and Mountain View, CA. That takes care of the two most important tech clusters in the world, IMO. May expand to more places as the portfolio of the fund expands….
Anyway, Mountain View, CA is hardly the moon for the Indian tech industry:)