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Google Ventures officially launched just over a year ago, but Google Inc.’s corporate venture investing arm didn’t have a website until Friday. Now, partners say Google is shooting for $100 million in investments each year, and its deal activity is likely to hit 30 or 40 investments a year.
With the quiet launch of its online presence, Google Ventures revealed the names of several partners it has hired since managing partner Bill Maris began working on the project two years ago.
Two of them are in Google Ventures’ Kendall Square office: Krishna Yeshwant and Scott Davis joined Android Inc. founder Rich Miner, who was named along with Maris as a founding partner of the venture arm. Yeshwant and Davis both have life sciences backgrounds.
The website also disclosed a new investment in the Boston area — Recorded Future — which does web search focused on time and event information, offering “new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future,” according to the website. Christopher Ahlberg, previously founder of the business intelligence startup Spotfire, is the founder. Serial entrepreneur Andy Palmer, who co-founded Vertica Systems Inc. with Michael Stonebraker, is also involved in the company, according to a Boston Globe report published in February, before Google invested.
Maris and partner David Krane, who are both based on the West Coast, held a conference call with reporters to discuss the venture arm’s plans. Maris confirmed early reports that Google Ventures expects to put $100 million to work each year, and he remained adamant that the corporate venture division will continue to pursue a stage- and industry-agnostic strategy.
“Venture (capital) as an asset class is pretty specific. To limit that more specifically by saying any number of things (for example) — we’re only going to be early stage or we’re looking for growth capital companies — you immediately limit the subset of companies that you’re looking at,” Maris said. “It may create higher peaks, but it also probably creates (lower) troughs as well.”
Maris acknowledged that most of the firm’s investments so far have been at the seed stage or the growth-capital stage. “Mid-stage Series C types of deals — we haven’t found as good a value proposition there,” he said.
Google Ventures, which announced in October it would back Adimab Inc., a New Hampshire drug discovery company, expects to make more life sciences investments, Maris said. Two areas of particular interest to the firm are regenerative medicine and bioinformatics. “It’s less likely we’d invest in a company that was moving one therapeutic from Phase 1 to Phase 2 clinical trials,” he said. “We’re looking for more transformative investments.”
Overall, Google Ventures has disclosed 10 investments in the 13 months since it launched. Maris declined to discuss whether those investments hit the $100 million target but said the firm’s deal activity could hit 30 or 40 investments a year now that its team is fully established.
Maris reiterated Google Ventures’ earlier statements that the venture arm will seek financial profit from its investments and not filter companies based on their strategic importance to the parent company.
He said entrepreneurs should not be fearful that Google’s management, with a fiduciary responsibility to quarterly and annual returns for its shareholders, will prove to be impatient with the venture industry’s long periods of illiquidity and high risk. “(CEO) Eric (Schmidt) and (founder and President of Technology) Sergey (Brin) manage Google for success, and this is an important part of Google,” he said. “It’s not going to go away in a year or two. Its existence and support don’t ride on share price.”
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