Why corporate venture capital funds are so popular

Venture capital we know: Early investing in hopefully promising companies, potentially high reward, but more often high risk. Venture capital firms — and rich people usually — are the ones doing it.

But there’s also something called corporate venture capital: when companies make investment funds of their own.

Google has Google Ventures, Twitter has Twitter Ventures, Intel has Intel Capital, and the list goes on.

Marketplace’s Senior Tech Correspondent Molly Wood talked with Kai Ryssdal about why corporate VC is quite the hot trend.

On why companies are interested in their own VC funds:

[Companies] are trying to figure out a way that they can invest in startups that they have some control over and so they can bring new ideas and new innovations in-house and not get disrupted by that startup that somebody else funded.

Click the audio player above to hear the full conversation.