Corporate Venture Capital Is Splitting In Two
The wind-downs at PayPal and Fidelity International may look like a retreat, but the data points to a concentration of power at the top of the market that smaller funds will feel first, writes guest author Steve Brotman of Alpha Partners. Guest Author By Steve Brotman Last month, PayPal confirmed its wind down of PayPal Ventures , the corporate venture arm it launched in 2016 and grew to more than $850 million across three funds. The company hired Jefferies to explore selling portfolio stakes on the secondary market, putting positions in companies such as Plaid and Anchorage Digital in play.
Key Takeaways
- Two corporate venture programs shutting down inside six weeks invites speculation that corporations are retreating from venture capital, but in fact the opposite is true.
Measured in dollars, corporate venture has never been stronger.
- Salesforce Ventures 1 and Cisco' s venture arm backed Anthropic's $3.
Amid this strength, though, corporate venture is also quietly splitting in two, and the proof is buried inside the record numbers.
- And notice that the wind-downs are coming from serious programs.
PayPal's arm ran for a decade and backed more than 80 companies , and Fidelity International manages hundreds of billions of dollars.
- To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that.
- Silicon Valley Bank 's State of CVC survey finds corporate funds pursuing fewer, more targeted deals, and the share using the secondary market jumped from 15% in 2024 to 22% in 2025; PayPal's Jefferies mandate takes that same path at the scale of an entire program.
Stats & Key Facts
- #Guest Author By Steve Brotman Last month, PayPal confirmed its wind down of PayPal Ventures , the corporate venture arm it launched in 2016 and grew to more than $850 million across three funds.
- #According to Bain Capital , corporate investors participated in 68% of global AI deal value in 2025 - venture's strongest funding year since 2021.
- #3 billion for its stake in Scale AI .
- #PayPal's arm ran for a decade and backed more than 80 companies , and Fidelity International manages hundreds of billions of dollars.
The news also arrived weeks after Fidelity International quietly closed its London-based venture unit . Two corporate venture programs shutting down inside six weeks invites speculation that corporations are retreating from venture capital, but in fact the opposite is true. Measured in dollars, corporate venture has never been stronger.
According to Bain Capital , corporate investors participated in 68% of global AI deal value in 2025 - venture's strongest funding year since 2021. Meta , Nvidia , Google , Disney , SpaceX and ASML all led billion-dollar rounds into AI companies last year, per Crunchbase data. Nvidia by itself made more than 40 startup investments and appeared in 13 of the 20 largest AI financings .
Bain attributes the elevated corporate participation largely to Big Tech , and the billion-dollar rounds trace back to the same short list of names. Take that handful out of the data and the year looks very different. Venture capital itself went through the same sorting over the past decade, as mega-funds absorbed more and more of the capital while everyone else competed for allocation, and corporate venture is now following the same script.
For more details please read the original article at Crunchbase News.
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