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Corporate venture studios have moved from the fringes of innovation strategy to the center of the boardroom. According to McKinsey's 2024 research on corporate venture building, 50% of CEOs now rank venture building among their top three strategic priorities. Even more telling, two-thirds of executives expect to engage in venture building within the next 12 months. The message is clear: large companies are no longer content to acquire or invest their way to growth. They want to build.
But what does that actually look like in practice? A corporate venture studio is a dedicated organization — either internal or partnered with an external firm — that systematically builds and launches new ventures using a corporation's assets, capital, and market access. Unlike accelerators or corporate venture capital arms, studios don't just fund ideas. They create them from scratch, validate them, and scale them. (For a deeper primer, see What is a Venture Studio?)
Not all studios are created equal. Some operate as fully independent entities; others sit within a corporate innovation division. Some build exclusively for their parent company's industry; others intentionally push into adjacent or entirely new markets. What separates the best from the rest is a repeatable process, dedicated talent, real capital allocation, and a willingness to explore beyond the core business.
Here are 10 corporate venture studios that are producing real results — measured in ventures launched, revenue generated, and strategic value created.
1848 Ventures is one of the most compelling examples of a corporate venture studio operating with genuine independence. Launched in 2018 with Highline Beta's support in designing the studio, 1848 Ventures is backed by Westfield Insurance but deliberately explores opportunities far beyond insurance — spanning construction, real estate, hospitality, retail, and restaurants. Based in Ohio, the studio focuses on building B2B SaaS products for small and mid-sized businesses, with a growing emphasis on AI-powered solutions.
What makes 1848 Ventures stand out is its disciplined approach. The team uses a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to identify unmet needs, and aims to launch a new venture each year. Their portfolio already includes TakeUp, an AI-driven hotel pricing platform; Propel People, a contractor hiring solution for the construction industry; and Vandra, an AI-powered eCommerce discount optimization tool. Each venture addresses a distinct market with real revenue potential — not science projects.
The studio recently named Kal Amin as Managing Partner, signaling continued investment and maturity. For a closer look at how 1848 Ventures evolved from concept to a functioning venture factory, this case study on the studio's innovation model is worth reading.
RBC Ventures is one of the earliest and most successful corporate venture studios in financial services. Royal Bank of Canada partnered with Highline Beta to design and build the studio, which went on to create multiple consumer-facing fintech ventures that are still active and growing today. The portfolio includes Ownr (online business registration), Dr.Bill (medical billing for physicians), Mydoh (financial literacy and money management for kids), and Houseful (a home ownership platform).
What's particularly instructive about the RBC story is how the organizational model evolved. RBC Ventures eventually transitioned into RBCx, the bank's technology and startup banking arm, which now scales and supports the portfolio. The ventures themselves didn't disappear — they matured. All four products are still operating, serving real customers, and generating revenue.
This trajectory demonstrates something important: a corporate venture studio creates lasting value even as the organizational structure around it shifts. The studio was the engine that built the ventures; the bank then found the right long-term home for them. For companies worried about what happens after the studio phase, RBC provides a clear answer.
Highline Beta ETH Finance represents a different kind of corporate venture studio — a vertical venture studio built around a deep thesis in a specific market. Rather than serving a single corporate parent, this studio focuses on the Ethereum ecosystem and the intersection of traditional finance (TradFi) with Web3 infrastructure. The thesis is deliberate: institutional adoption of blockchain technology, not consumer crypto speculation.
The studio's credibility is reinforced by its Venture Partner, Dmitry Buterin, a blockchain expert and the father of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In 2026, the studio published "The Future of Finance: Institutional Realities & the Role of Ethereum," a research report that mapped the opportunity landscape for institutional players entering the Ethereum ecosystem. The team is currently building its first venture in the space, focused on wealth management.
Highline Beta ETH Finance is a useful example for any company or studio considering the vertical studio model. Rather than trying to build everything for everyone, a vertical studio goes deep on a single sector, developing proprietary insight and deal flow that generalists can't match. For more on how Highline Beta evolved toward the vertical studio model, this overview explains the strategic logic.
X, the Moonshot Factory is arguably the most famous corporate venture studio in the world. Founded in 2010 as a division of Alphabet, X was designed to tackle global-scale challenges through breakthrough technology — what the company calls "moonshots." The model is simple in concept and enormously difficult in execution: identify a massive problem, propose a radical solution, and build the technology to make it real.
The results speak for themselves. Waymo, which graduated from X, is now the leading autonomous vehicle company operating in a sector valued at over $100 billion. Wing, another X spin-out, operates commercial drone delivery in six U.S. cities for Walmart. Verily is applying AI and data science to life sciences and healthcare. In 2025, X launched Series X Capital, a $500 million-plus fund specifically designed to spin out promising projects as independent companies — giving ventures the capital and autonomy they need to scale outside of Alphabet.
X represents the venture factory model at its most ambitious scale. It's resource-intensive and not replicable for most corporations, but it proves a core principle: when companies commit dedicated teams, capital, and processes to building new ventures, the outcomes can be transformational. Most companies won't aim for moonshots, but they can apply the same structural discipline to more grounded opportunities.
P&G Ventures shows what happens when one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies turns its venture-building apparatus toward categories where it doesn't currently compete. Launched in 2015, P&G Ventures deliberately builds brands in adjacent spaces — pest control, pet care, automotive — rather than extending existing product lines. The goal isn't incremental growth; it's new market creation.
The flagship success story is Zevo, a line of insect control products that became P&G's first new brand to reach $100 million in annual sales since Febreze in 1998. That's a striking data point for a company with one of the most extensive brand portfolios on earth. The studio has also launched AeroFlexx (flexible liquid containers) and Nanospun (cell-based biological products), both of which demonstrate P&G's ability to build ventures with real technological differentiation.
P&G Ventures uses a systematic pipeline: identify underserved consumer needs, partner with entrepreneurs and technical founders, build MVPs, test through direct-to-consumer channels, and then scale through P&G's massive retail distribution network. That last step is the unfair advantage. A startup building an insect control brand would spend years and millions getting shelf space at Walmart and Target. A P&G venture can get there in months. This is the corporate venture studio model working exactly as it should — combining startup speed with corporate distribution.
Kamet Ventures is the venture studio arm of AXA, one of the world's largest insurance companies. Founded in 2016 and based in France, Kamet has explored over 1,000 ideas since inception, filtering them through a rigorous selection process to build ventures in insurtech and healthtech. The volume of ideation paired with disciplined execution is what distinguishes a studio from a one-off innovation project.
The portfolio includes several ventures that have scaled well beyond the prototype stage. Air Doctor connects travelers with private doctors in over 75 countries. Akur8 uses AI to automate insurance pricing — a deep technical problem that requires both actuarial expertise and machine learning capability. Birdie provides smart homecare technology for elderly patients, combining IoT sensors with care management software.
Kamet demonstrates the vertical thesis approach applied at scale. By focusing on insurance-adjacent spaces where AXA has deep domain knowledge, distribution relationships, and regulatory expertise, the studio can build ventures that a general-purpose startup studio simply couldn't. The lesson: corporate assets aren't just capital. They're domain expertise, customer access, regulatory knowledge, and brand trust.
Forward 31 is Porsche Digital's corporate venture builder, founded in 2020. What makes Forward 31 particularly interesting is its mandate: build digital business models beyond the automotive industry. Porsche could have used its venture studio to develop car-adjacent technology. Instead, it chose to explore completely new markets, using the Porsche brand and digital capabilities as a launchpad.
The portfolio reflects that ambition. Navit is a navigation and mobility platform. THE EMBASSIES is an intergenerational hospitality concept. House of Beautiful Business focuses on organizational reinvention and the future of work. These are not what you'd expect from a luxury car manufacturer, and that's precisely the point. Forward 31 demonstrates that venture building is a strategic tool for brand and capability expansion, not just product development.
For corporations trapped in the mental model of "innovation must serve our existing business," Forward 31 is a powerful counter-example. A venture studio that only builds for the parent company's current market limits its upside. The most effective studios — like Forward 31 and 1848 Ventures — treat the corporate parent as a source of resources and credibility, not as a constraint on what they can build.
X15 Ventures is Commonwealth Bank of Australia's venture-scaling engine, founded in 2020. Modeled on a similar philosophy to the RBC approach, X15 builds fintech and digital solutions aimed at Australian consumers and businesses. The studio operates with startup speed and independence while leveraging CommBank's 17 million customer base as a distribution and testing advantage.
The portfolio includes Home-in, a digital conveyancing platform that simplifies property settlement; Kit, a pocket money app designed to teach kids financial skills; and Truyu, a digital identity protection service. Each venture addresses a real consumer pain point in the Australian market, and each benefits from CommBank's infrastructure and customer relationships.
X15 is part of a clear trend: major banks around the world are turning to venture studios to build fintech products rather than trying to acquire them or build them through traditional IT departments. The studio model gives these institutions the speed and entrepreneurial culture they need to compete with pure-play fintechs, while retaining the trust, regulatory standing, and scale that startups spend years trying to build.
Neosfer is Commerzbank's innovation hub and venture builder, founded in 2013 in Frankfurt, Germany. As one of the longest-running corporate venture studios in European banking, Neosfer has developed 417 prototypes and sponsored six venture projects, giving it one of the most extensive experimentation track records in the industry.
The studio focuses on digital and sustainable financial services. Its portfolio includes the LISSI App, a digital identity solution; 21strategies, which applies AI to planning automation; and Circula, an expense management platform that has gained traction across the German market. Each venture addresses a specific friction point in business or consumer finance.
Neosfer's longevity is notable. Many corporate innovation programs launch with fanfare and disappear within three to five years. Neosfer has operated for over a decade, refining its process through hundreds of prototypes and learning what works. That sustained commitment — paired with a willingness to kill ideas that don't validate — is a hallmark of studios that produce lasting results rather than innovation theater.
ENGIE Factory is ENGIE Group's startup studio, based in Singapore and focused on one of the most consequential challenges of our time: the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. While most corporate venture studios operate in financial services, technology, or consumer goods, ENGIE Factory is one of the few dedicated entirely to climate-tech and sustainable energy.
The studio builds ventures that help accelerate decarbonization — from distributed energy solutions to sustainability-focused software for enterprises. ENGIE's position as one of the world's largest utility companies gives its ventures access to infrastructure, regulatory relationships, and pilot environments that pure-play climate-tech startups struggle to secure.
ENGIE Factory demonstrates that venture building is not limited to software and fintech. It can be applied to hardware-intensive, infrastructure-heavy, and regulation-dense industries where the barriers to entry are highest — and where corporate assets provide the greatest advantage. For companies in energy, manufacturing, or heavy industry, this studio shows what's possible when venture building is applied to sustainability goals with real urgency.
These 10 studios span insurance, banking, CPG, automotive, energy, technology, and blockchain. They're based on three continents and range from teams of a dozen to organizations of hundreds. But they share a set of common characteristics that explain their results:
The model works whether a company builds its studio internally or partners with an external firm like Highline Beta to design, launch, and operate one. What matters is treating venture building as a strategic capability, not a one-off project. Studios that get sustained executive commitment, real capital, and operational independence are the ones that produce ventures worth talking about.
If you're evaluating whether a corporate venture studio is right for your organization, start by understanding the model in depth. What is a Venture Studio? covers the fundamentals. Digging into the Corporate Innovation Venture Studio Model goes further into how large companies are structuring these efforts for real impact. The companies on this list prove that when venture building is done right, it's not just innovation theater — it's a growth engine.
