Dell's venture practice out of stealth, to invest $100M in startups annually

Dell Technologies, has announced that its venture practice Dell Technologies Capital is out of stealth and has been an active investor in more than 70 early age statups. According to the company, the venture practice has been helping helping founders and their teams develop innovative technology solutions and bring them to market and will be investing about $100 million every year in startups across the globe. The venture practice is the result of combining both Dell and EMC venture capital arms into one entity post Dell-EMC merger. “At Dell Technologies Capital, we have a fundamental understanding of what promising young companies need to change the world,” said Michael Dell, Chairman and Chief Executive, Dell Technologies.

“We provide the resources, scale and expertise to help them continue innovating and maximize their potential.”

Dell states that the ventures team focuses on emerging technology areas that are relevant to the Dell Technologies’ family of businesses, namely; Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware. The venture practice has invested in areas such as storage, software-defined networking, management and orchestration, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Big Data analytics, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) and DevOps. “Capital is merely table stakes to set a startup company on the path to success. New companies are looking for active investment partners who provide breadth and depth of expertise and access to resources and scale,” said Scott Darling, President, Dell Technologies Capital.

“Dell Technologies Capital is comprised of a team of highly experienced investors with an extensive network of industry contacts to help our portfolio companies achieve escape velocity. We’ve been making these investments in stealth mode for a number of years and are accelerating our pace of investments.”

According to the company, Dell Technologies Capital offers experienced board members, technical expertise as well as global access, channel, OEM and go-to-market relationships that are exclusive with Dell Technologies’ family of businesses. In addition, it also provides access to industry-leading technologists, investors and company executives. According to media reports, the company has been investing in startups through Dell Ventures and EMC but this is the next step of the investment program. The company also claimed that Dell Technologies Capital had largely made its startup investments in the US, Israel and China. The announcement was made at the Dell EMC World 2017, the company’s first large scale event after it merged with EMC. Apart from Dell Technologies Capital, the company also announced its new software defines storage products, new data backup and protection solutions, updates to its hyper-converged infrastructure portfolio, flexible consumption models for IT transformations and its new 14th generation PowerEdge Servers.