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Cocoon Ventures is a very distinct venture firm.  We are a Silicon Valley venture firm with support from Mitsubishi’s Innovation Kitchen in Tokyo.  Separately, the two firms serve as cross-border counterparts; however, together we function as a single venture family.  This is an important difference.  We don’t just invest separately in our locales – we collaborate.

Our strength comes from reaching smart entrepreneurs all over the world and leveraging new and traditional venture models to launch startups with significant advantage.  Along with a global perspective, we maintain a network of thought leaders who help us in understanding the ecosystem around a venture.  This means that we may consider investment in your venture as both a standalone company, or as a part of something larger.  By doing so, we help all of our portfolio companies realize their full potential. 

Flexible Structure

There are several investment options available to entrepreneurs that work with us; however, the options available to your venture will depend on our partnership’s view of your specific venture and industry.

  • Traditional venture investment: This means we can make a capital investment in exchange for a preferred equity stake in your company. In this scenario, we do everything a traditional venture firm does.
  • Purchase:  We can just buy your technology outright for cash or some combination of cash and equity. 
  • License or joint-venture:  We can license your technology for some time period and/or for specific geographic regions.  This license can involve any combination of fixed fees as well as royalties.  Additionally, we also have the option to work with companies through a joint venture.  For example, let’s say you’ve launched Your Company Inc in San Francisco and for the first 5 years you plan to focus on evangelizing your product in the US only.  Well, through a joint venture, we can launch Your Company Japan, build a team in Japan and help you translate and augment your product to work well in Japan.  In this type of scenario, we can be perfectly aligned with you as fellow entrepreneurs – not something easily achieved with other venture groups.

Cross Border

Just because a technology is born in one locale doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better market entry point in a different geography.  Cocoon Ventures invests with a global perspective.  Our cross-border approach allows us to aggregate and collect technologies from all over the world then aggregate deploy them in the most optimal geography.  What does that mean for your venture?  Well, it may make more sense to leverage your technology and launch company in a different geography or work together with us to expand your venture to multiple geographies.  Let’s say you’re located in the US and you have a world changing mobile phone platform or application.  It might make more sense to use our network to reach Japanese mobile carriers right away.  Why? Because the Japanese mobile market is one of the most mature in the world.  With our help, your venture will experience earlier success with faster customer adoption and carrier cooperation.  Likewise, our exclusive access to great technologies from all over the world can be used to increase your competitive advantage in your own locale.  Additionally, we can work with you to go global, or do a joint venture or license for your technology and then build a team to extend your presence to another country.

We Work with Large Corporations and Institutional LPs

Cocoon Ventures is an early stage venture firm.  We work directly with large international corporations, organizations holding significant technology portfolios and traditional institutional investors. 

  • We give our LPs great financial returns on their capital through truly proprietary deal flow and venture capital models.
  • We serve to either partially or fully outsource the early stage venture capital functions of large corporations.  We can help extend your reach to every geography within our network.  This reach can be used to import innovations or to provide an “antennae” function in multiple geographies to help large corporation keep their edge by getting a sense for best of breed emerging technologies
  • We provide absolute transparency and reporting about all of our activities, something that many VCs don’t provide.  We are happy to provide data as granular as having insight into the decision making process on a deal by deal basis, the scoring mechanism and process for ranking and ultimately investing into companies.
  • We work directly with corporations that see strategic value in our deal pipeline.  Right up front, before we make an investment, we seek the insight of relevant corporations within our network.  As a result, we are able to understand a corporation’s strategic needs right away and our portfolio companies are able to develop strong alliances early on.  In many case, we leverage large enterprises to help us with diligence and provide insight into our investing process.  It just makes sense.  Why wouldn’t we want a great relationship with a potential acquirer – it’s good for our entrepreneurs, it’s good for the corporation, and it’s good for us.

 
 
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