Trend Micro launches $100M venture fund to nurture IoT startups

Trend Micro, a Japanese cybersecurity firm has announced the launch of a corporate venture fund to explore emerging technology markets. With an initial investment of $100 million, this venture fund will allow the company to nurture a portfolio of startups that are incubating ideas and living at the epicenter of hyper growth markets, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). According to Gartner estimates, 26 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.

“Trend Micro’s vision has always been to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. The explosion of devices is transforming how the world works, thinks and acts. It is clear that the ecosystem is still evolving and there is work to do to ensure organizations and individuals can operate and live safely in this new reality,” said Eva Chen, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Trend Micro.

The company claims that the venture will offer companies financial backing, access to its global threat intelligence, strategic alliances, as well as its channel of more than 28,000 partners. In return, working with these investments will uncover insights into emerging ecosystem opportunities, disruptive business models, market gaps and skillset shortages. These learnings will influence Trend Micro’s cybersecurity solution planning across the company. Chen notes that the first mega wave the company caught was the growth of the PC marketplace, and hence they committed early on to endpoint protection. The second mega wave was all about the cloud, and Trend Micro made a bet early on to securing the cloud and so far has secured over two billion workload hours on Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone. She now believes that the next wave has arrived with IoT, and the fund will help harness this opportunity.