Robert Bosch Venture Capital sets up third fund with €150 mn

Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, the corporate venture capital arm of the Bosch Group, today announced the setting up of a third fund with a corpus of €150 million.

With its third fund, Robert Bosch Venture Capital now has €420 million under management. It plans to continue investing in innovative start-ups and in selected industry-specific venture capital funds in Europe, the US, Israel, and China.

''The new fund will continue focusing on disruptive start-ups in the areas of automation and electrification, energy efficiency, enabling technologies, and healthcare systems. Investments will also be done in services and business models as well as new materials that are relevant to the above-mentioned areas of business'', says Ingo Ramesohl, managing director and co-head of Robert Bosch Venture Capital.

Robert Bosch Venture Capital's investment portfolio includes some well-known companies such as Movidius, a market leader in embedded machine vision, and Greenpeak, market leader for smart home communication devices.

In one of its latest exits, the Israeli company Pebbles, which Robert Bosch Venture Capital identified early as a leader in the field of gesture recognition, was sold to Facebook.

''Robert Bosch Venture Capital successfully shapes the innovation leadership of Bosch through valuable connections to the start-up ecosystem'', says Volkmar Denner, chairman of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH.

These investments give Bosch an early access to disruptive innovations generated by the start-up ecosystem. Furthermore, the activities of Robert Bosch Venture Capital support Bosch's technology leadership with open innovation powered by start-ups, the company said.

Robert Bosch Venture Capital invests in seed, early and late stage venture capital rounds and participates in the follow-on investments in privately held companies.

Depending on the stage of the company, the initial amount of investment ranges from below €500 thousand for a seed funding to more than €5 million in an early to late stage funding round.

The typical aggregate investment allocation per portfolio company, including follow-on investments, ranges between €6 and €15 million for usually a ten to 25 per cent equity position in each company.