While economic conditions in the United States continued to be turbulent in the third quarter, the year-to-date engagement of corporate venture capital groups remains strong relative to the post-bubble period, and significantly exceeds pre-bubble levels. For the first three quarters of 2011, corporate groups participated in more than 15% of the deals, and provided almost 9% of the capital. This corresponds to $1.9 billion invested in 419 deals.  A full breakout of corporate venture investment can be found here.

In the seven reported quarters in 2010 and thus far in 2011, clean technology companies seem to be of keen interest to this group, which invested $1.1 billion into 118 clean tech deals during this 21-month period. This represents approximately 28% of the total corporate venture dollars deployed during this time.  The clean technology category crosses traditional MoneyTree industry sectors where corporate venture investment is especially prevalent in life sciences (23% of all corporate VC for the last 7 quarters), industrial/energy (23% of CVC) and software (18% of CVC).

Corporate venture capital continues to be a critical component of U.S. venture investing and we are optimistic that these healthy percentages will hold as more companies are finding strategic value in entering the startup ecosystem.