A corporate venture arm sits inside a large organization, reports to people with budget, and exists specifically to find outside companies worth working with. Every fund in this database is attached to a corporation that buys things.
So we mapped them.
This is a free, ungated database of 206 corporate venture capital funds across North America and Europe, with 12 fields per fund: name, domain, LinkedIn, a full description, investment stages, target countries, portfolio link, market focus, general contact email, check size, HQ address, and country code.
Below: what the data says about stages, checks, and geography, and how to use a CVC list for something other than fundraising.
What you will find in this article
- What stage corporate VCs actually fund, and why it surprises people
- Check sizes, and why two thirds of these funds will not tell you theirs
- How narrow their geographic mandates really are
- What corporates invest in, which is not what the hype cycle suggests
- What corporate money costs you beyond equity
- How to use a CVC as an entry point to the parent company
What is corporate venture capital?
A corporate venture capital fund is an investment arm owned by an operating company rather than by limited partners. Saint-Gobain runs NOVA. BMW runs BMW i Ventures. Yamaha Motor runs a fund out of Silicon Valley. Wellstar Health System runs Catalyst.
The structural difference from a traditional fund matters more than the label. A financial VC makes money when your equity appreciates. A corporate VC often has a second mandate: find technology, partners, and distribution that help the parent company. That dual purpose shapes everything about how they behave.
The descriptions in this database make it explicit. Several funds state plainly that they establish co-development, distribution, marketing, or licensing agreements alongside investing. One writes that for some ventures, the right outcome is not capital at all but access to vehicles, technology, teams, hardware, or infrastructure.
Read that as the offer. What you get from a CVC is frequently worth more than the check, and occasionally the check is beside the point.
Corporate VCs are not early-stage money
This is the finding that reframes the whole category.
Ninety-one percent do Series A. Six percent do pre-seed.
If you have a deck and a prototype, corporate venture is almost certainly the wrong door. The category concentrates hard around Series A and B, which is exactly where a corporate can validate that your technology works, that customers pay for it, and that a partnership would survive contact with their procurement department.
Most of these funds cover multiple stages. Seventy-three cover three stages, 41 cover four, and 38 invest at a single stage only. The typical mandate spans Series A through C.
The practical read: build to Series A readiness before you approach corporate investors, and if you are earlier, treat them as future investors worth knowing rather than current targets.
Two thirds of them will not publish a check size
Every fund in this database has a domain, a LinkedIn page, a written description, a stated stage range, a target country list, and an HQ address. All 206, all complete.
Then the numbers thin out. Market focus is filled for 86%, a portfolio link for 81%, a general contact email for 67%, and a check size for just 34%.
Among the 70 funds that do disclose, the median entry ticket is $250,000 and the median ceiling is $5 million. The spread is enormous. The smallest entry ticket in the file is a few thousand dollars. The largest ceiling reaches $100 million.
Grouping the disclosed ranges by where they start: 7 funds open below $100,000, 22 between $100,000 and $250,000, 5 between $250,000 and $500,000, 11 between $500,000 and $1 million, and 17 at $1 million or above.
By ceiling: 19 cap out at $2 million or less, 27 land between $2 and $5 million, 5 between $5 and $10 million, and 11 go above $10 million.
The two thirds who publish nothing are not being evasive. Corporate investment committees size the check to the strategic value of the deal, which means the number is genuinely variable. It also means you cannot qualify these funds from the spreadsheet, and the first conversation has to establish whether their range fits your round.
They invest much more narrowly than they look
The median fund in this database invests in three countries. The mean is 5.9, dragged upward by a handful of funds with sprawling global mandates, one of which lists 130 countries.
Broken down: 46 of the 206 funds invest in exactly one country. Another 104 cover between two and five. Forty-five cover six to fifteen. Only 11 go beyond that.
Roughly three quarters of these funds have a mandate covering five countries or fewer. The image of corporate venture as globally roaming capital is wrong for most of the category.
Where they do look, the ranking is: the United States appears in 146 mandates, the UK in 99, Germany in 76, Canada in 65, and Israel in 53. France, Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden follow.
Israel in fifth place stands out, given that the database covers North America and Europe. More corporate funds here will invest in Israeli companies than in French ones, which reflects how thoroughly Israeli deep tech has embedded itself in corporate innovation pipelines.
On headquarters, the US holds 98 of the 206 funds, or 48%. Germany follows with 29 and the UK with 24. France has 8, then Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden with 5 each, across 23 countries in total.
German corporate venture punching well above its economic weight relative to France and the UK is a direct reflection of the Mittelstand and the large industrial groups that sit behind these funds.
They fund the value chain, not the hype cycle
Grouping the market focus fields by theme, climate and energy leads, appearing for 16% of funds. Sustainability, ESG, and circular economy follow at 13%, tied with industrial, manufacturing, robotics, and supply chain. Fintech sits at 12%, health at 11%, and mobility and automotive at 9%. Construction and proptech, plus cybersecurity, each appear for 6%.
Artificial intelligence appears for only 5%.
That last number looks wrong until you remember what these funds are for. A financial VC chases the category the market will reward. A corporate VC invests in its own value chain. Saint-Gobain looks at construction technology and industrial energy transition. BMW looks at batteries, electrification, and autonomy. A utility looks at grid technology. AI shows up inside those verticals rather than as a category of its own.
For a founder, this is useful in a specific way. If you sell into an industrial, energy, healthcare, or construction value chain, corporate venture is a far richer pool than generalist funds. If you are building a horizontal AI tool, the fit is thinner than the headline count suggests.
What corporate money costs you
The upside of a strategic investor is real: distribution, credibility, technical validation, pilot access, and a customer relationship attached to the cap table.
The costs are equally real and less discussed.
Signaling. A strategic investor from one corporation can make competitors in that industry reluctant to buy from you. If your market is three large players and one of them owns part of you, the other two notice.
Speed. Corporate investment committees run on corporate timelines. Diligence that a financial fund closes in six weeks can take four months when legal, procurement, and a business unit sponsor all have to sign.
Strategic drift. A corporate investor wants the roadmap to serve their needs. That pull is subtle and cumulative, and it is worth deciding in advance how much of it you will accept.
Rights that are not standard. Right of first refusal, exclusivity clauses, and information rights that would be unusual from a financial fund show up more often in corporate term sheets. Read them carefully and negotiate them explicitly.
None of this is an argument against corporate money. It is an argument for going in with the trade priced correctly.
The side door: using CVCs as enterprise entry points
If you sell B2B rather than raise, this database is a target list of a different kind.
Each of these 206 funds is attached to a large corporation. BMW i Ventures connects to BMW. NOVA connects to Saint-Gobain. Catalyst connects to a health system with roughly 30,000 employees. Via ID connects to Mobivia, one of Europe's largest automotive services groups.
Corporate venture teams are unusually good entry points into those organizations, for three reasons.
They are structurally open to outside contact. Their job is to find external companies, so an inbound message from a company they have never heard of is not an interruption. It is the work.
They are senior and connected internally. A CVC director sits close to the business units and knows which one owns the problem you solve. That is exactly the internal navigation that makes enterprise selling slow.
They are easy to reach. All 206 have a LinkedIn page and a domain, and 137 publish a general contact email.
The play is not to pitch software to a venture fund. It is to be genuinely useful to their portfolio, and to let that relationship carry you into the parent organization. Offer something the portfolio needs, deliver it without a sales attachment, and the introduction to the operating business follows naturally.
Corporate venture arms also spend money themselves on deal-flow tooling, research, portfolio reporting, and platform services, which makes them a legitimate direct target as well.
How to approach a corporate VC
Lead with the strategic fit, not the round. A financial fund cares about the return. A corporate fund cares about what your technology does for their business. Open with that and the conversation is different from the first sentence.
Find the business unit sponsor early. Corporate investments almost always need an internal champion in an operating division. Identify who owns your problem area before the second meeting, because the deal will stall without them.
Ask about check size in the first call. Only a third publish it. There is no efficient way to learn it other than asking directly.
Check the portfolio before you write. Eighty-one percent link to theirs. Whether they already back a competitor, or a company adjacent enough that you would be additive, changes your entire approach.
Expect a longer process, and plan the round around it. Do not let a corporate diligence timeline become the critical path on a round you need to close this quarter.
Four mistakes worth avoiding
Approaching at pre-seed. Six percent of these funds do pre-seed. The category is Series A and B money.
Treating a CVC like a financial VC. The pitch that works on a seed fund, all market size and growth curves, lands differently with a corporate investor who wants to know how you fit their operations.
Ignoring the geographic mandate. Three quarters of these funds invest in five countries or fewer, and the field is populated for every row. Checking it takes seconds and saves entire outreach cycles.
Taking strategic money without pricing the constraints. Signaling risk, roadmap pull, and non-standard rights are the actual cost. Decide what you will accept before the term sheet arrives.
FAQ
Is the database free? Yes. No form, no email, no gate. Open the sheet and make a copy.
How many corporate VCs does it include? 206 funds headquartered across 23 countries in North America and Europe.
What stage do corporate VCs invest at? Overwhelmingly Series A and B. In this dataset 91% invest at Series A and 77% at Series B, while only 6% do pre-seed and 33% do seed.
How big is a typical corporate VC check? Among the 70 funds that disclose, the median entry ticket is $250,000 and the median ceiling is $5 million, with individual ranges running from a few thousand dollars up to $100 million.
Which country has the most corporate venture funds? The United States, with 98 of the 206. Germany is second with 29 and the United Kingdom third with 24.
Do corporate VCs invest internationally? Less than reputation suggests. The median fund covers three countries, and 46 invest in a single country only.
What sectors do they focus on? Climate and energy lead, followed by sustainability and circular economy, industrial and manufacturing, fintech, health, and mobility. Corporate funds invest along their own value chain rather than chasing general market trends.
Can I use this list for sales rather than fundraising? Yes, and it is arguably the better use. Every fund is attached to a large corporation, all 206 have LinkedIn pages, and 137 publish a contact email.
How current is the data? Mandates, check sizes, and contacts change. Verify before building a campaign on any single row. A handful of rows contain field-entry errors, so clean the file before importing.
What to take away
Ninety-one percent of these funds invest at Series A and only 6% at pre-seed. Corporate venture is not early-stage capital, and approaching it too soon wastes a quarter.
Only 34% publish a check size. Where they do, the median range runs from $250,000 to $5 million. Ask directly, because the spreadsheet will not tell you.
The median fund invests in three countries and 46 invest in exactly one. Check the mandate before you write.
Climate, industrial, and sustainability lead the sector mix while AI appears for just 5%. These funds invest along their own value chain, which makes them a strong fit for vertical technology and a weak one for horizontal tools.
Every one of the 206 is attached to a corporation that buys things. For a B2B sales team, that is the most valuable column in the file, and it is not even a column.
We build outbound campaigns into exactly this kind of account structure, where the fund is the entry point and the parent organization is the deal. If that is the motion you want running, book a free consultation.
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