Siemens Kicks Off $100 Million Venture Fund for Startups

German electronics and electrical engineering conglomerate Siemens’ (SI) Industry Sector and Venture Capital units have kicked off a $100 million Industry of the Future Fund specifically to invest in early-stage startups involved in manufacturing and industrial automation.

Siemens said it is particularly interested in backing embryonic companies pioneering digital technologies that carry the potential to transform industrial markets or even to spark new ones. Siemens’ Venture Capital unit, which is housed under its Financial Services organization, will manage the fund. To date, Siemens’ venture arm has taken positions in about 180 startups, the majority of which are already matured companies.

Siemens formalized the new fund on the heels of its two recent investments—one in Montreal-based Lagoa, a provider of cloud-based 3D visualization software, and another in Boston-headquartered CounterTack, a cybersecurity software developer.

“As digitization and software are becoming increasingly important for manufacturers to compete in the global marketplace, the Industry of the Future Fund will support Siemens’ ‘Industrie 4.0’ strategy by providing capital to those companies whose innovative technologies and vision have the potential to change the landscape of manufacturing and industrial automation,” said Siegfried Russwurm, Siemens Industry Sector chief executive and Siemens AG managing board member.

Siemens’ interest in early-stage startups as a cousin to ongoing capital investments maps to similar moves other large companies have made of late. For example, Google (GOOG) Ventures made 75 investments in new companies in 2013 along with 10 exits, a track record that included three IPOs. At the same time, Google Capital, the vendor’s financing arm, last year participated in a $444 million private funding of SurveyMonkey and a $361 million investment in Uber Technologies.

And, as Tech Crunch, which charts such things, pointed out, more corporations are starting to take on a look of traditional VCs. According to its data, in October 2013, 14 percent of investments, or 48 venture funding rounds valued at more than $719 million, included corporate VC participation.

It will be interesting to see how corporate VC involvement moves the needle on the Internet of Everything—by 2020 projected to be a machine-to-machine dominated blueprint of 200 billion devices, 15 percent of which will be connected. The segment increasingly is drawing the attention of larger companies—the latest is an IBM (IBM) and AT&T (T) collaboration—looking to get in on the ground floor of a market some are valuing at north of $19 trillion worldwide.