Member-only story
Let me give the perspective of someone that’s taken money from a corporate VC and pitched many more.
In our particular case, the introduction to the strategic (corporate) came through one of our existing investors. Gill knew someone on the board of the potential strategic investor.
Gill’s introduction led to a meeting at our facility with the CEO.
So, we gave the CEO our standard investor pitch, and the CEO liked what he heard. He said “we fit a hole” in their business model.
He then passed it off to his team for the rest of the process. In many ways the process of getting money from a strategic is similar to a traditional VC, but here’s a key way it’s different:
You usually need a division head sponsor at the corporate investor.
I’ve seen this with every strategic I’ve ever tried to raise money from. Early on in our history, we got very close to getting funding from a $1B/year public company (Cypress Semiconductor) in our space.
Cypress’ investment team liked the idea of investing in our company, and we had a sponsor inside the company. This meant that a VP of one of the company’s divisions was essentially going to “own” the success of the investment inside the…
