 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Private equity |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Defunct | n/a |
| Headquarters | , |
| Parent | Comcast |
| Website | www |
Comcast Ventures is a corporate venture capital firm headquartered in New York, NY.
| | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Private equity |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Defunct | n/a |
| Headquarters | , |
| Parent | Comcast |
| Website | www |
Comcast Ventures is a corporate venture capital firm headquartered in New York, NY.
In early 2011, Comcast and NBCUniversal combined their two venture arms, Comcast Interactive Capital founded in 1999 and the Peacock Fund, to form Comcast Ventures. [1]
In 2012, Comcast Ventures set up the Catalyst Fund with $20 million under management to invest in underrepresented entrepreneurs. [2] In January 2020, NBA Champion Andre Iguodala joined the Catalyst Fund as a Venture Partner. [3]
In November 2020, Comcast announced its venture arm would be folded into the corporate business division led by Sam Schwartz. [4] Between 2011 and 2020, Amy Banse was the Managing Director and Head of Funds. [5] The firm’s partners also included Gil Beyda, Andrew Cleland, Sam Landman, Dinesh Moorjani, Rick Prostko, Dave Zilberman, Daniel Gulati, and Kim Armor. [6]
In November 2021, Allison Goldberg joined Comcast Ventures as Managing Partner. Allison previously served as Group Managing Director & Senior Vice President of Time Warner Investments, where she ran the group focused on investing up to $25MM in private companies to generate both strategic value and financial returns for Time Warner Inc.
As of December 2023, the group's partners include Allison Goldberg, Marc Silberman, and Michelle Chang.
Comcast has been ranked the 4th Corporate Startup Investor in the World.[ citation needed ] In the past six years up to 2017, the corporation had invested in 105 early-stage companies. [7] These companies include Away (luggage), [8] CloudPassage, [9] Dandelion Energy [10] FanDuel, [11] Quantifind, [12] Slack Technologies, [13] Vox Media, [14] Yieldmo, [15] and ZeroFox. [16]
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs in over 900 ventures, including America Online, Amazon.com, Tandem Computers, Compaq, Electronic Arts, JD.com, Square, Genentech, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Nest, Palo Alto Networks, Synack, Snap, AppDynamics, and Twitter. By 2019 it had raised around $9 billion in 19 venture capital funds and four growth funds.
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
David Oliver Sacks is a South African-American entrepreneur, author, and investor in internet technology firms. He is a general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Additionally, he is a co-host of the All In podcast, alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal, and founder and CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for ten months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb.
Amy L. Banse was the Managing Director and Head of Funds for Comcast Ventures, Senior Vice President of Comcast Corporation, and serves on the board of directors at Adobe Systems Incorporated, Clorox, and Lennar.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
Klaus Hommels is a German venture capitalist. He focuses on early and growth-stage investments and has founded his own venture capital fund by the name of Lakestar, through which he has been investing mainly in digital businesses. He has been invested in Facebook, Skype and Xing; other examples are Klarna and Revolut.
David "Dave" McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded the business accelerator 500 Startups and served as its CEO until his resignation in 2017. He founded Practical Venture Capital soon after, a new venture capital fund that would continue to work with companies he previously funded through 500 Startups.
Mark Suster is an American businessman and investor. He is a managing partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in Los Angeles. Aside from his business career, Suster is also a prominent blogger in the American high-technology startup scene and venture capital world.
AngelList is an American software company for fundraising and connecting startups, angel investors, and limited partners. Founded in 2010, it started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startups to raise money from angel investors free of charge. Created by serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi in 2010, Avlok Kohli has been leading AngelList as its CEO since 2019.
OurCrowd is an online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage while still privately held. Based in Jerusalem, the company launched in February 2013, and has since opened overseas branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Singapore, Brazil, and the UAE.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Social Capital, formerly known as Social+Capital Partnership, is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The firm specializes in technology startups, providing seed funding, venture capital, and private equity.
Shervin Kordary Pishevar is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, super angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Hyperloop One and a co-founder and managing director of Sherpa Capital, a venture capital fund which has invested in companies including Airbnb, Uber, GoPuff, Cue Health, Slack, Robinhood, Munchery and Postmates.
eShares, Inc., doing business as Carta, Inc., is a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. The company digitizes paper stock certificates along with stock options, warrants, and derivatives to allow companies, investors, and employees to manage their equity and track company ownership. The company also operates CartaX, a private stock exchange.
Upfront Ventures, formerly known as GRP Partners, is a Santa Monica-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies. It is one of the largest venture capital firms in Los Angeles, with $2 billion in total raised funds. Since its founding in 1996, Upfront Ventures has invested in more than 200 companies, with notable exits including Ulta, Overture, PayPal Credit, TrueCar, Disney Digital Network, Kyriba, and Ring.
Venture capital in Poland is a segment of the private equity market that finances early-stage high-risk companies based in Poland, with the potential for fast growth. As of March 2019, there is a total of 130 active VC firms in Poland, including local offices of international VC firms, and VC firms with mainly Polish management teams. Between 2009–2019, these entities have invested locally in over 750 companies, which gives an average of around 9 companies per portfolio. The Polish venture market accounts for 3% of the entire European ecosystem of VC investments, mainly in the digital space.
