Google becomes venture capital firm

Wants a piece of your business as well

31 March 2009 7:15 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Struggling to find ways to spend its vast pots of cash, Google has announced that it will now be venturing into the venture capital sector with the launch of Google Ventures.

"This is Google's effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies", Rich Miner and Bill Maris, managing partners, Google Ventures posted on the Google blog.

The new venture, according to the two partners aims to succeed "By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google's unique technical expertise and brand".

Google says it will be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, and healthcare.

Citing a "now is the time" mantra the company clearly hopes that if there is a company out there that will, in time grow to out seat them from the top spot, at least this way chances are they will be backing them.

Full tags

Biz, Google