17/09/2026
Corporate Venture Capital in Healthcare: Why CVC Is Necessary but Not Sufficient
4PM Ventures — a European HealthTech Venture Builder & Platform Engine — considers the combination of Corporate Venture Capital and Corporate Venture Building to be one of the strategic directions for its future development.
We therefore closely examine market trends, established models and the practical experience of corporations to define our place in this market and offer potential strategic partners and investors our perspective on developing corporate innovation through two complementary instruments:
* Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) — corporate venture investment;
* Corporate Venture Builder (CVB) — the systematic creation of new companies and platforms.
In our [previous publication]https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GTcE3oefJ/
we continued the discussion initiated by Maija Palmer with Axel Deniz of Bosch Business Innovations, Ralph Wilson of Arup Ventures and Jim Adler of Toyota Ventures on collaboration between CVCs and Venture Builders.
We explored questions that innovation leaders from several corporations have raised with us in recent months: where to find a team capable of launching a CVB, how to assess its capabilities, whether it should sit inside the corporation, and how relationships between the CVC, CVB and existing business units should be structured.
Continuing this discussion, we turned our attention to Jon Warner’s article, [“The Value of Strategic Corporate Investment Funds in US Healthcare.”](https://optimaljon.medium.com/the-value-of-strategic-corporate-investment-funds-in-us-healthcare-b86306d09b33)
The article offers a useful overview of healthcare CVC practices in the United States. It demonstrates how hospital systems, insurers and other healthcare companies use venture investment not only to generate financial returns, but also to gain access to technologies, conduct pilots, improve operational efficiency and establish strategic partnerships.
This model has clear advantages. However, its analysis also reveals a significant limitation.
Corporate venture funds primarily select from companies that already exist. They can provide capital, access to the corporation, a validation environment and commercial opportunities. Yet they rarely assume responsibility for creating the company itself—and even less often for combining several complementary companies into a functioning platform.
This distinction is particularly important in healthcare. Many market opportunities cannot be realised through a single product or startup.
A remote patient monitoring device, an AI model, a clinical service, a medical dataset and an insurance product may each create value independently. Their full potential, however, emerges only when someone combines them into a coherent care delivery model with a common architecture, clear rules for working with data, a clinical validation system and a viable commercial logic.
The central question of our analysis is therefore:
- Can Corporate Venture Capital independently create new healthcare markets, companies and platforms—or do corporations require an additional venture-building capability?
Our position is that **CVC is necessary, but it is not sufficient**.
CVC provides capital, strategic access and an investment mandate. A Corporate Venture Builder identifies what is missing, creates new companies and combines technologies, teams and business models into platforms.
What does a corporation actually acquire by creating a healthcare CVC?
A corporation does not create a CVC merely to acquire minority stakes in startups. More importantly, it gains access to strategic opportunities that would be difficult or too slow to develop exclusively through internal R&D.
A CVC can act as a technology radar, giving the corporation early access to emerging business models, technologies and teams. It enables the organisation to observe market development from within—through investment rights, engagement with founders, participation in pilots and access to information about portfolio companies.
The corporation also gains an opportunity to test whether an external technology can address a specific operational or market need. An investment may become the starting point for a commercial partnership, product deployment, entry into a new segment or, under certain conditions, a future M&A transaction.
Strategic value, however, does not arise automatically once an investment is made. If the CVC lacks a clear mandate, an internal business sponsor and a defined path from investment to pilot, procurement or scaling, it risks becoming either a passive financial portfolio or an expensive market-monitoring instrument.
CVC performance should therefore not be measured solely by the number of transactions, portfolio size or financial returns. Corporations should also assess which new capabilities the fund has created for the core business, which hypotheses it has enabled the organisation to test, and which new markets it has helped to open.
At the same time, a CVC should not become merely a preparation vehicle for inexpensive acquisitions. Startups and independent co-investors need confidence that the corporation is interested in increasing the company’s value rather than restricting its strategic options in preparation for a future purchase.
Hospital-backed and insurer-backed CVCs solve different problems
Jon Warner’s article illustrates that CVCs created by hospital systems and those created by insurers use similar instruments but pursue different strategic objectives.
For a hospital-backed CVC, priorities may include improving quality of care, automating clinical and administrative processes, reducing staff workload, working with medical data, improving diagnostics and patient flow, and increasing infrastructure efficiency.
A hospital system can give a startup access to a clinical environment, healthcare professionals, patients and real-world workflows. In some cases, it may simultaneously become the investor, pilot environment and first customer.
An insurer views innovation from a different perspective. Its priorities include risk management, reducing avoidable costs, early disease detection, chronic disease management, population health, care navigation and the creation of new insurance products.
These differences can create conflicting incentives. A solution that increases revenue for a healthcare provider does not necessarily reduce costs for an insurer. A technology that may improve long-term patient outcomes can require additional investment and significant changes to existing hospital processes.
Hospital networks and health insurers may therefore be interested not only in establishing their own CVCs, but also in creating joint CVC + CVB models that develop companies and platforms at the intersection of their interests. The hospital system contributes the clinical environment and an understanding of healthcare delivery, while the insurer provides risk data, reimbursement logic, access to a large customer base and the economics of disease prevention.
Within such a structure, a Corporate Venture Builder can act as an independent technological entrepreneur, formulating a shared investment thesis and designing a business model that aligns the participants’ interests.
CVC creates its own chicken-and-egg problem.
Many corporate investors want to see the results of a successful pilot before making an investment decision. Yet conducting a meaningful pilot requires funding, access to data, integration with corporate systems, specialist involvement and the time of corporate employees.
This creates a closed loop: the CVC expects the hypothesis to be validated before investment, while the startup cannot validate it without the corporation’s resources and support.
The problem is particularly acute in healthcare, where a pilot rarely consists of a simple product demonstration. It may require a clinical protocol, legal and regulatory preparation, access to medical data, integration, clear performance criteria and the involvement of healthcare professionals.
Transferring all these costs to the startup makes pilots inaccessible to early-stage companies and forces the corporation to choose only among already well-funded projects. As a result, it may gain access not necessarily to the most promising technologies, but to the companies that have already managed to raise capital.
One potential solution is the use of **funded pilots** and a dedicated pre-investment validation mechanism.
This is precisely why the 4PM Ventures team created **Future Health Lab** — a programme for supporting startup development and rapidly testing investment and platform hypotheses. We are ready to offer it to corporate partners as an instrument for preparing projects for pilots and investment.
"Future Health Lab" enables a corporation to avoid building the entire early-stage venture-building infrastructure from scratch, thereby reducing the operating costs and organisational risks of launching its own CVB.
CVC usually arrives after the hardest work has already been done.
By the time a company becomes understandable and investable for a traditional corporate investor, someone has already had to identify an unmet need, select the technology, assemble the team, resolve IP ownership, develop the business model, build the initial product, organise validation and obtain the first evidence of demand.
This is the most uncertain and labour-intensive part of creating a new business.
CVC is well suited to evaluating an existing investment opportunity, but it does not usually answer the question of where that opportunity should come from. If no company exists that can deliver the corporation’s strategy, the investment unit simply has nothing to invest in.
Historically, many corporate funds also operated according to a logic close to M&A, entering companies at later stages after the technology, team and market had already been established. This strategy reduced technology risk but also required the corporation to invest at significantly higher valuations.
Some CVCs encountered another problem. Independent investors could be cautious about the participation of a strategic corporation in the capital structure or board of a rapidly growing startup. They might fear that the strategic investor would restrict collaboration with competitors or seek to contain the company’s valuation before a potential acquisition.
Faced with the high cost of later-stage deals and the limitations of an M&A-oriented approach, some CVCs have begun to reconsider their strategies and move towards earlier stages.
Simply moving the investment cheque from Series B to Pre-Seed, however, does not solve the problem. Early-stage investment requires more than due diligence. It requires the ability to participate in company creation, team formation, business-model validation and the organisation of initial pilots.
This is why CVC interest in earlier stages inevitably leads to the question of collaboration with Corporate Venture Builders.
Ecosystem investing is moving closer to a platform model.
One of the approaches described by Jon Warner involves investing not in an isolated solution, but in a set of complementary companies that can collectively create a more comprehensive offering.
This represents an important shift from isolated transactions towards ecosystem investing. However, a portfolio of complementary startups is not yet a platform.
In our discussions with investors and corporations, we regularly encounter confusion between the concepts of an **ecosystem** and a **platform**. Many companies describe themselves as platforms when, in practice, they offer a single product, a marketplace or a loosely connected set of services.
Five startups held in the portfolio of one CVC will not automatically begin working together. They must agree on architecture, integration, data, IP, clinical and legal responsibilities, revenue sharing, a common commercial model and interaction with the customer.
In practice, it is difficult for startups to organise this cooperation independently. They have different investors, priorities, financing timelines, product roadmaps and commercial interests.
The central question of ecosystem investing is therefore not simply, “Which complementary companies should we invest in?” It is:
> Who will turn a collection of investments into a functioning platform?
Over the past three to four years, 4PM Ventures has experimented with different models for combining technologies and companies and has been developing a toolkit for platform assembly. We understand the complexity of this process and consider these accumulated approaches to be one of our assets with value for investors and corporate partners.
We explain our understanding of platform models in more detail in [“Why Platforms Are Important”](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-platforms-important-4pmventures-p7whe/) and [“Platform Business Model.”](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/platform-business-model-4pmventures-n81mf/)
A platform is not M&A—and startups do not have to lose their independence
A platform model does not require one corporation to acquire every participant. Unlike a traditional M&A roll-up, startups can retain their ownership, teams, cap tables and corporate governance, while remaining independent investable assets.
A shared architecture can nevertheless enable them to work collectively with data, clinical partners and distribution channels, serve larger customers and participate in an offering that none of them could create independently.
Value is created not by eliminating the participants’ independence, but by coordinating them and expanding their commercial opportunities. To achieve this, however, the rules governing IP, data, revenue and customer relationships must be defined before deep integration begins.
A strategic investor can create concentration risk.
Corporate participation can significantly accelerate the development of a startup, but excessive dependence on a single strategic partner creates a new risk.
If one corporation simultaneously becomes the principal investor, pilot environment, largest customer and potential acquirer, other investors and customers may perceive the startup as dependent or effectively as a captive asset.
An effective CVC + CVB model should therefore preserve the ability to attract independent capital, work with multiple customers and enter international markets. Strategic alignment with a corporation should not become commercial isolation.
The non-obvious role of CVC and CVB as organisers of R&D co-financing.
A limited corporate R&D budget does not necessarily mean that a corporation must abandon a promising technology or finance the entire development cycle itself.
CVC and CVB can act as organisers of an investment syndicate, attracting other corporations, independent venture funds, family offices and public institutions to finance the project. This makes it possible to distribute technological and financial risk and mobilise significantly greater resources than the corporation could provide independently.
Another opportunity is to transfer part of the R&D activity to universities. A corporation or CVB can provide the co-financing required to secure research and innovation grants and subsequently organise the commercialisation of the results through a new company or platform.
CVC + CVB can therefore become not only a source of corporate capital, but also a mechanism for attracting external financing to address strategic R&D challenges.
What is happening with healthcare CVC in Europe?
Corporate venture capital exists in European healthcare, but its structure differs significantly from that of the US market.
The most visible European players are primarily associated with pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and life sciences:
* [Novartis Venture Fund](https://www.nvfund.com/) invests in life sciences companies from Seed to later stages across Europe and North America;
* [Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund](https://www.boehringer-ingelheim-venture.com/) focuses on therapeutics, digital health and emerging scientific platforms;
* [Leaps by Bayer](https://leaps.bayer.com/) invests in biotechnology, healthcare and breakthrough science;
* [Sanofi Ventures](https://www.sanofiventures.com/) supports biotech and digital health companies from Seed to Series B and beyond;
* [UCB Ventures](https://www.ucb.com/about-ucb/magazine/detail/article/ucb-ventures-and-axa-venture-partners-seeking-innovation-in-digital-health) invests in therapeutics and digital health, including through collaboration with other venture funds;
* Philips Ventures and related Philips investment initiatives focus on medical technologies, software and healthcare services.
Europe has accumulated considerable experience in corporate investment around drug development, biotechnology, medical devices and individual digital health solutions. These are the sectors in which substantial corporate R&D budgets, IP management systems, experience of working with startups and clear strategic reasons for investing have historically developed.
Outside pharma, biotech and medical devices, however, the market appears considerably less mature.
In many European countries, entire categories of key healthcare stakeholders have yet to establish a systematic approach to innovation through their own CVCs or CVBs. Their innovation activities often remain limited to individual pilots, accelerator programmes, the procurement of ready-made solutions and internal digital transformation projects.
Corporate venture activity appears particularly uneven among:
* hospital networks;
* health insurers;
* medical assistance companies;
* care providers.
There are, of course, individual exceptions. [Allianz X](https://allianzx.com/), for example, demonstrates that an insurance group can establish a professional strategic investment arm. However, its published [investment criteria](https://allianzx.com/contact) focus primarily on mature late-stage and growth-stage companies with proven standalone business models.
This gives the corporation access to new technologies and markets, but it does not address the systematic creation of healthcare companies and platforms at the earliest stages.
This is where we see not only an existing gap, but also significant opportunities for development.
Hospital networks, insurers, medical assistance companies and care providers are among the organisations closest to real clinical and operational problems. They have access to patients, healthcare professionals, data, clinical and insurance use cases, distribution channels, provider networks and infrastructure for conducting pilots.
Yet possessing these assets does not automatically create the ability to turn them into an investment thesis, a standalone company or a scalable platform. This requires a permanent entrepreneurial capability operating at the intersection of corporate strategy, technology, venture investment and new business creation.
For these organisations, the challenge is therefore not simply to establish another corporate investment unit. A CVC focused on selecting existing companies would solve only part of the problem. They also need access to venture-building capabilities that can transform clinical needs, data, infrastructure and operational expertise into investable companies and platforms.
This capability can be developed internally through a CVB or established in partnership with an external sector-focused Venture Builder. The right model depends on the scale of the innovation pipeline, the available budget and the corporation’s willingness to maintain its own entrepreneurial team.
The essential point is that a series of disconnected pilots must be replaced by a permanent operating capability for creating and developing new businesses.
What opportunities could this create?
For **hospital networks**, it could enable the creation of companies and services in clinical workflows, diagnostics, healthcare data, AI validation, Hospital at Home and remote patient monitoring.
For **health insurers**, it could support the development of prevention, chronic disease management, population health, care navigation and outcome-based healthcare, as well as new insurance products based on earlier risk identification and prevention.
For **medical assistance companies**, it could transform existing medical and operational centres from infrastructure that reacts to individual cases into a foundation for continuous monitoring, early intervention, preventive care, and new B2B and B2C services.
For **care providers**, it could turn their clinical expertise, operating processes and care delivery models into scalable digital products, services and platforms.
CVC and CVB can therefore become more than tools for identifying innovation. Together, they can provide a mechanism for creating new revenue streams, investable assets and growth opportunities beyond the corporation’s existing core business.
What can 4PM Ventures offer?
4PM Ventures is ready to work with hospital networks, insurers, medical assistance companies and care providers as a sector-focused venture-building partner.
Depending on the partner’s objectives, we can offer:
* an assessment of corporate assets, unmet needs and new business opportunities;
* the development of a strategy and operating model for a CVC, CVB or combined CVC + CVB structure;
* the design of new healthcare services and platform concepts;
* the identification and selection of relevant startups, technologies and university-developed innovations;
* hypothesis validation and pilot preparation through our **Future Health Lab** programme;
* the creation of venture teams, standalone companies and PlatformCos;
* investment preparation and the organisation of syndicated co-financing.
A corporation does not necessarily need to build an entire venture-building infrastructure or recruit a scarce entrepreneurial team from scratch. An external, sector-focused Venture Builder can provide the required expertise, tools and processes while reducing the cost, time and organisational risks of launching such a capability.
Corporate Venture Builders must operate both inside-out and outside-in.
Corporate Venture Building should not be limited to an inside-out model that transforms a corporation’s existing IP, data, knowledge and technologies into standalone companies.
Its more complex role is to work outside-in as well: to identify missing technologies, startups, founders and partners, and combine them with the corporation’s internal assets, infrastructure and market access to create new companies and platform concepts.
In this role, a CVB becomes more than an internal accelerator or innovation department. It acts as an **institutional technological entrepreneur**, taking responsibility for designing and assembling businesses that neither the corporation nor individual startups could create independently.
Must a Corporate Venture Builder sit inside the corporation?
Not necessarily. A fully internal CVB may inherit the approval cycles, risk aversion, budget constraints and incentive structures of the corporation whose existing rules it is also expected to challenge.
In many cases, a more effective model may be a **corporate-backed but independently operated Venture Builder**. This structure can preserve entrepreneurial speed, autonomy and incentives while giving the corporation access to new companies and platforms aligned with its strategic priorities.
Such collaboration can be financed through a corporate or CVC investment in the Venture Builder, anchor investment in thematic platforms, project-by-project investment in ventures created by the CVB, a thematic portfolio mandate, or syndicated financing with external partners.
We explored these models and the related practical questions in more detail in our [previous publication](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fedotkin_corporateventurebuilding-venturebuilder-cvc-ugcPost-7505982240284319744-FBzO/).
What the analysis confirms for 4PM Ventures.
The investment priorities described by Jon Warner closely reflect the platform focus that 4PM Ventures developed independently through its own market research, industry discussions and venture-building work.
Our initial focus on **HEALDEX, Homecare and Hospital at Home, and Metabolic Syndrome** corresponds with the areas attracting strategic attention from US hospital systems and healthcare insurers: healthcare data and interoperability, AI validation, remote and connected care, chronic disease management, prevention and population health.
This convergence provides external validation of the direction selected by 4PM. More importantly, it suggests that our platform concepts may be relevant not only to financial investors, but also to hospitals, insurers, medical assistance companies and other healthcare corporations seeking structured access to strategically important innovation.
Conclusions: CVC can finance the future—but someone must build it.
Jon Warner’s analysis demonstrates the strategic value of corporate investment in healthcare. CVC can provide capital, market access, validation opportunities and strategic relationships. At the same time, the article exposes the limitations of investment without a corresponding venture-building capability.
First, Europe may not lack capital or market participants as much as it lacks the ability to combine them into functioning businesses. According to the [Karista European Digital Health Funds Mapping 2025](https://www.karista.vc/stories/2025-european-digital-health-funds-mapping), the number of European funds investing in digital health increased from 84 in 2021 to 254 in 2025, while the European ecosystem includes more than 3,800 digital health companies.
The challenge is therefore increasingly not only to attract additional capital, but also to connect technologies, corporate assets, clinical validation, customers and market access—and convert them into scalable companies and platforms.
Second, the US healthcare CVC model cannot simply be replicated in Europe. In the United States, a hospital system or payer may simultaneously act as an investor, pilot environment, first customer and scaling channel. In Europe, these roles are more often distributed among separate organisations, public institutions and national healthcare systems.
European healthcare venture creation therefore requires deliberate coordination between corporations, clinical partners, buyers, payers, regulators and external investors.
Third, the future should not be framed as a choice between CVC and CVB. The two perform different but complementary functions:
> CVC asks which existing company it should invest in. CVB asks which company or platform should exist—and how it can be created.
Or, more simply:
> CVC acquires strategic optionality. CVB creates it.
An effective Corporate Venture Builder must therefore operate both inside-out and outside-in: commercialising internal corporate IP, data and expertise while also bringing in external technologies, startups, founders and investment.
Because one technology rarely creates an entire healthcare platform, someone must design the architecture, identify the missing components and organise their development around a shared market opportunity.
This capability does not necessarily have to sit entirely inside the corporation. In many cases, a corporate-backed but independently operated, sector-focused Venture Builder may be better positioned to preserve entrepreneurial speed and incentives while remaining aligned with the corporation’s strategic objectives.
An invitation to continue the discussion.
We would be interested to hear the perspectives of corporations, CVC leaders, Venture Builders and healthcare investors.
Can a CVC create new healthcare markets without a venture-building capability? Should that capability be developed internally or in partnership with an independent, sector-focused Venture Builder? Which organisational and investment models can preserve both corporate strategic alignment and the entrepreneurial autonomy of the companies being created?
4PM Ventures is open to discussing these questions and exploring practical models of collaboration with hospital networks, insurers, medical assistance companies, care providers, pharmaceutical and MedTech corporations, CVCs, venture investors, family offices and public innovation institutions.
We are ready to discuss investment in 4PM Ventures as a European HealthTech Venture Builder, the creation of corporate-backed CVBs, the joint development of healthcare platforms, thematic CVC + CVB models, and the transformation of corporate technologies, data and market knowledge into new investable assets.
> CVC can finance the future. But first, someone has to design it, assemble it and turn it into an investable asset.
This is the role we see for the Venture Builder.
You can learn more about our activities, approaches, venture-building tools and perspectives on the future of healthcare markets on the [**4PM Ventures page**](https://www.linkedin.com/company/4pmventures/).
We have also collected a series of publications explaining the 4PM investment and venture-building thesis in the comments under [**this post**](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7490717855563542528).
To discuss this article or potential collaboration, please contact us through LinkedIn or at [email protected].
Author: Yuri Fedotkin
Co-founder and Managing Partner, 4PM Ventures
