Comcast Ventures

Comcast Ventures
Company typePrivate
IndustryPrivate equity
Founded1999; 25 years ago (1999)
Defunctn/a
Headquarters
New York, New York
,
U.S.
ParentComcast
Websitewww.comcastventures.com

Comcast Ventures is a corporate venture capital firm headquartered in New York, NY.

History

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In early 2011, Comcast and NBCUniversal combined their two venture arms, Comcast Interactive Capital founded in 1999 and the Peacock Fund, to form Comcast Ventures. [1]

In 2012, Comcast Ventures set up the Catalyst Fund with $20 million under management to invest in underrepresented entrepreneurs.[2] In January 2020, NBA Champion Andre Iguodala joined the Catalyst Fund as a Venture Partner.[3]

In November 2020, Comcast announced its venture arm would be folded into the corporate business division led by Sam Schwartz.[4] Between 2011 and 2020, Amy Banse was the Managing Director and Head of Funds.[5] The firm’s partners also included Gil Beyda, Andrew Cleland, Sam Landman, Dinesh Moorjani, Rick Prostko, Dave Zilberman, Daniel Gulati, and Kim Armor.[6]

In November 2021, Allison Goldberg joined Comcast Ventures as Managing Partner. Allison previously served as Group Managing Director & Senior Vice President of Time Warner Investments, where she ran the group focused on investing up to $25MM in private companies to generate both strategic value and financial returns for Time Warner Inc.

As of December 2023, the group's partners include Allison Goldberg, Marc Silberman, and Michelle Chang.

Investments

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Comcast has been ranked the 4th Corporate Startup Investor in the World.[citation needed] In the past six years up to 2017, the corporation had invested in 105 early-stage companies.[7] These companies include Away (luggage),[8] CloudPassage,[9] Dandelion Energy[10] FanDuel,[11] Quantifind,[12] Slack Technologies,[13] Vox Media,[14] Yieldmo,[15] and ZeroFox.[16]

References

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  1. ^ Matt Rosoff (December 12, 2011). "Comcast Has A Huge New Venture Fund, And This Woman Is Running It". Business Insider. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  2. ^ Shona Ghosh (October 7, 2017). "Diversity is a massive problem in Silicon Valley — meet the fund backing minority entrepreneurs". Business Insider. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  3. ^ Kevin Stankiewicz (February 14, 2020). "NBA champ and tech investor Andre Iguodala counts Zoom's triple since IPO as best investment". CNBC. Retrieved March 6, 2020.
  4. ^ Alex Sherman (November 13, 2020). "Comcast to fold Comcast Ventures into corporate business division, focus on strategic investment". CNBC. Retrieved June 23, 2021.
  5. ^ Matt Rosoff (December 12, 2011). "Comcast Has A Huge New Venture Fund, And This Woman Is Running It". Business Insider. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  6. ^ Shona Ghosh (October 7, 2017). "Diversity is a massive problem in Silicon Valley — meet the fund backing underrepresented entrepreneurs". Business Insider. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  7. ^ Weiss, Haley (2017-06-19). "Comcast Ranked 4th Top Corporate Startup Investor in the World". Philadelphia Magazine. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  8. ^ Tanya Klich (June 28, 2018). "Luggage Startup Away Raises $50M In Series C And Hits Profitability Within Two Years". Forbes. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  9. ^ "Most Active VC's in the XR Space". Retrieved 2019-11-22.
  10. ^ "Dandelion Energy Closes $16 Million Series A Round To Expand Geothermal Energy". CleanTechnica. 2019-02-15. Retrieved 2019-04-26.
  11. ^ Darren Heitner (January 30, 2013). "Fantasy Sports Service, FanDuel, Secures $11 Million Investment; Includes Money From Comcast Ventures". Forbes. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
  12. ^ Gina Hall (February 24, 2016). "Marketing insight platform Quantifind raises $30M and will double Menlo Park staff". Silicon Valley Business Journal. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  13. ^ Katie Roof, Josh Constine (2015). "Slack is work chat's runaway train, raises $200M at $3.8B". Tech Crunch. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  14. ^ staff (October 15, 2013). "Comcast Ventures-backed Vox Media Raises $34 Million". CityBizList Philadelphia. Archived from the original on February 22, 2014. Retrieved December 2, 2018.
  15. ^ "Gil Beyda - Comcast Ventures Managing Partner | Signal". Signal: where top founders find and get introduced to the right VCs. Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  16. ^ "ZeroFOX Secures $11M Series A Led by NEA to Combat Social Cyber Attacks". Wall Street Journal. 2014-04-30. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2019-11-29.
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