Tech Companies Still In The VC Game

from the not-going-anywhere dept

There have been all these reports about corporate VCs getting out of the game now that the economy headed south. However, it appears that some corporate VC programs are going strong. Intel, Dell, Cisco, and Oracle are keeping up with their VC investments. To them, in a lot of ways, it's almost like an add on to their research department. They fund some company to go off and experiment on something, and if it works out, they have early access to the technology and knowledge about it. The question, though, is how long Wall Street will accept losses from that part of the business. It might make sense to stop calling it corporate venture capital for that reason. Venture capital has the connotation of investing for a large return.