Ready for a quick year-end update on Google Ventures?
Ready or not, out it came this morning with several observations worth passing along.
First the high-level stuff: as you know, Google last month increased the annual cash it hands to its venture arm to $300 million from $200 million. This should allow the organization to make more late stage investments.
Perhaps to keep step, Google Ventures expanded to 60 people this year and the companies it’s funded now top 150.
Here is the interesting stuff: Google offered a breakdown by sector of its investments:
- Mobile, 32%
- Consumer Internet: 31%
- Commerce: 16%
- Big data: 10%
- Life sciences: 6%
- Energy: 5%.
It also listed eight exits:
- Stamped, to Yahoo;
- Dasient, to Twitter;
- Hipster to AOL;
- BufferBox to Google;
- Also PrimaTable, Zencoder, Milk and ThinkNear.
One more thing: Shinya Yamanaka, scientific advisor to startup iPierian, which also has taken money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners, won a Nobel Prize in medicine.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
