Dell Technologies Capital, the venture investment arm of Dell Technologies said that it has witnessed strong investment momentum one year after coming out of stealth. According to company executives, from May 2017 to April 2018, the investment team completed 24 new and follow-on investments as part of its $100 million average annual investment run rate.
“Since 2012, Dell Technologies Capital has made 81 investments focused on early-stage startups that span a broad range of technology areas,” said a statement. In the past year, a third of new investments focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and the remaining investments focused on security, next-gen infrastructure and other technology areas strategic to the Dell Technologies family of companies.
Dell Technologies said that the venture team had 11 exits in the past year including three unicorn IPOs worth more than $11 billion. Dell Technologies Capital was the first institutional investor in Zscaler, a network security company which went public in March 2018. Dell Technologies Capital invested in MongoDB, which went public in October 2017 and the recently public DocuSign. These IPOs had a collective market valuation exceeding $11 billion.
The Dell Technologies Capital portfolio includes several startups currently experiencing growth rates of more than 100% and several exceeding $50 million in revenue.
“Since coming out of stealth at Dell EMC World last year, we've had a very busy, and very successful, year,” said Scott Darling, president of Dell Technologies Capital. “We are delighted with our continued strong performance and the market reception to the Docusign, MongoDB and Zscaler IPOs. The real value we bring to Dell Technologies and our startup portfolio companies is through our joint work, which allows us to deliver best-of-breed solutions for our customers faster, especially in emerging tech areas.”
The Dell Technologies Capital investment team is comprised of industry professionals with a mix of both operational and investment expertise, providing not only the insight to identify promising technologies and teams but also the knowledge and skill to help their portfolio companies achieve scale. The team focuses on early-stage investments in several emerging technology areas including but not limited to the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, ML, developer-led Infrastructure, next-gen infrastructure, server-less computing, and security.
