UPDATED 12:33 EDT / OCTOBER 03 2013

SAP Launches $650 Million Startup Fund

The frontier of Big Data innovation, startups have become a key focus for business intelligence giant SAP. The company’s independent investment arm recently launched a $650 million direct investment fund, SAP Ventures Fund II, which will focus on late stage technology companies.

Taken together with the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, a recently bolstered fund-of-funds that invests in early stage startups, SAP Ventures has raised more than $1 billion in the last 12 months. This figure underscores SAP’s efforts to address the rapid adoption of analytics, cloud computing and mobile among the traditional enterprises that constitute its customer base.

“We believe that we represent a new breed of venture capital funds. We are in a unique position of being independent and yet having unparalleled access to one of the world’s largest global ecosystems of enterprise customers and partners,” said Nino Marakovic, the CEO and managing director of SAP Ventures. “As a result, we help entrepreneurs tap into proven approaches for customer acquisition and international expansion. They get the best of both worlds — an unmatched mix of independent funding and the relationships of an enterprise powerhouse.”

The growing presence of corporate investors in Silicon Valley is helping analytics startups accelerate time to market. Numerify, a stealth company that is working to integrate data sources across the cloud and on-premise environments, recently raised $8 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and over half a dozen industry bigwigs. Notable investors include ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman, Google Enterprise president Amit Singh and Abhay Parasnis, the former head of Oracle’s public cloud business.

Set to release in early 2014, the company’s offering aims to help organizations “rapidly deliver the meaningful numbers necessary to successfully chart the course of their businesses.”


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