Venture Capital investments by Google

Metro India News | Hyderabad : $240 billion plus. This is the cumulative total venture capital investment made by Alphabet (Google Group). Its venture capital activity started in year 2009 and gained traction from 2015. The pure corporate venture capital (CVC) arms of Alphabet are Google Ventures (GV), CapitalG, and Gradient Ventures. These arms invested about $40 bln and Alphabet directly invested the major amount. Usually, CVC investments have an inbuilt objective of strategic partnerships or acquisitions.

But Alphabet’s vehicles have independence in investing and have even invested in companies that directly compete with Google. GV invests in early-stage Startups in life sciences, tech and consumer sectors. Its notable investments include Uber, Slack, Gitlab, Neuralink, and Insitro. CapitalG invests in late-stage growth equity to fund position them towards IPO. Its notable investments include Airbnb, Clay, CrowdStrike, UiPath, and OpenRouter. Gradient Ventures invests in AI. Alphabet’s notable direct investments include Reliance Jio, SpaceX, Planet Labs, ARM, and ASTS.

If internal teams of Alphabet get an encouraging solution not related to Alphabet’s business, such teams will be spun off as independent Startups owned by those employee-teams and Alphabet extends venture funding. GV has portfolio of 880 companies, CapitalG has 120 companies, and Alphabet has direct investee companies of 300 altogether totaling 1,300 Startups. There is no overlap of investee companies in their portfolios. As per Alphabet’s September 2026 financials, its current outstanding venture-related investments are $130 bln.

GV has no holding timeline while CapitalG prefers 8 plus years. Direct investments have no holding timeline either, but Alphabet takes calls as per situations. Notable exits of its venture investments are Uber, Slack, Robinhood, Docusign, Flatiron health, Airbnb, and Motorola. In its lifetime, Alphabet made $150 bln gains from its venture investments of which only $10 bln is realized and balance is unrealized lying as paper wealth.

Such venture investments justify 5X returns. If the same amount is invested in Alphabet’s shares, it would have become $1 trillion as of now. Thus, Alphabet lost pretax gains of $850 bln which is an indirect contribution to the Startup ecosystem. However, its investments in SpaceX, Anthropic, etc are expected to yield multi-fold returns to compensate the opportunity losses.

Alphabet has separate teams in each arm totaling 300 persons. Additionally, it has 3,000 active Googlers called Alphabet Employee Network. They are fulltime engineering, marketing and sales employees who support the investee Startups to scale up. There are criticisms that by making venture investments in early-stage Startups in similar fields, Alphabet is avoiding monopoly allegations creating a legal defense against anti-trust suits. Since Alphabet’s investments are financial and not strategic, its objectives have pure commercial elements than economic responsibility.

Alphabet is not an exception in having valuation standoffs, control negotiations, and operational targets. There are complaints that it is very difficult to approach Alphabet for investments even for deserving and proven Startups. A Startup itself until 2004, Alphabet has world’s largest corporate venture capital, excluding pure-play Venture Capital firms like Softbank and financial institutions like JP Morgan. Alphabet has competitors for all its verticals except for its venture capital investment verticals, positioning it far above its contemporaries.

- Dr. Kishore Nuthalapati

The author is serving as the CFO of BEKEM Infra Projects Pvt Ltd