👉 Background: Woolworths is Australia's biggest supermarket chain with a 33% market share in Australia. But in recent years, Woolies has also built a venture capital fund called W23, which has invested in companies like Marley Spoon and Eucalyptus.

👉 What happened: Now, Woolworths is going even bigger. It will launch a $190 million corporate venture capital fund - together with four overseas retailers. We're talking UK chain Tesco, Canadian retail conglomerate Empire Company and South Africa’s Shoprite Group. It will be called the very original name - W23 Global.

👉 What else: W23 Global wants to invest in startups and then help these startups gain access to a group of big potential customers (i.e. global supermarket behemoths).

What's the key learning?

💡Corporate venture capital is when corporates invest funds directly into external startups. This allows them to get exposure to new technologies as well as big commercial opportunities - without building it themselves.

💡There are a number of corporate VC's in Australia such as W23 for Woolworths, x15ventures for CommBank, Telstra Ventures for Telstra and even BHP.

💡But not all of them have survived the turn of the tech market. In fact, Salesforce shut down their Australian VC and Touch Ventures, the VC arm initially backed by Afterpay, has seen a major shakeup. For Woolworths, the aim here is to back useful companies, and then help them grow and go global early.

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