Corporate venture capital falls in the second quarter

Corporate VCs slowed their investment activity in the second quarter, putting to work less than half of what they did in the United States during the first three months of the year.

It was the first quarter in two years to show a declining deal participation rate.

For the quarter, corporate venture capitalists deployed $1.2 billion in 198 U.S. deals, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. That put their participation rate at 20.6 percent of venture deals in the United States, the study found.

The participation rate was 23.7 percent in the first quarter, when $2.5 billion went to work in 240 deals. The last time the participation rate fell was in the third quarter of 2014.

A third of the corporate dollars went to biotech companies and another third to software companies, the two largest industry sectors by a wide margin.