May corporates be good matchmakers for startups and VCs?

Cloudflare final week introduced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that construct on its software program, Cloudflare Staff. However this isn’t a company enterprise fund and that sum isn’t firm cash.

Slightly, it’s an initiative through which the cloud infrastructure firm curates a bunch of its startup prospects and presents them to enterprise capitalists, every of which dedicated $50 million to again firms constructing on Cloudflare Staff. The record of 26 enterprise funds contains large gamers like NEA and Boldstart and smaller companies like Pear VC. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince informed me that quantity has continued to develop for the reason that mission was introduced in September.

The rationale that is fascinating is that whereas public firms have been drastically growing their presence in startup funding lately, it’s largely been via considered one of two playbooks: Corporations have been both setting apart a sleeve of capital on their steadiness sheet to again startups in adjoining or complementary sectors to their very own, or they have been launching an accelerator program.

This technique from Cloudflare feels recent. And if profitable, it may show to be a reasonably sensible guess. This system primarily helps funnel cash to its prospects, thus securing their want for the platform, whereas additionally attracting startups to contemplate constructing on Cloudflare over different platforms — with out Cloudflare having to spend something. It’s value noting firms getting into this program, no matter whether or not they get pitched to VCs, do get a number of software program options for a 12 months without cost.

However will a company like Cloudflare be an excellent matchmaker? Prince appears to suppose so — he informed me that the thought for this system got here from the corporate’s conversations with enterprise capitalists.