Adobe announced yesterday at their Max conference that they will be funding startups that leverage Adobe technologies (particularly Apollo) to the tune of $100 million.
What’s Apollo? It’s a new, cross-platform runtime technology that takes Flash and HTML (as well as other common browser scripting languages) out of the browser.
Investing in targeted startups is a great idea–particularly while inexpensive investments are still “acceptable.” With this fund, Adobe should be able to spread their money quite effectively. Even at $250K per company per year their investment strategy could have significant impact. Heck, $50K can make a huge difference for a one or two person team early on too. What Adobe has to resist though is the urge to place large bets on a small number of companies. This may make it easier to manage the investment portfolio, but it’s unlikely to have the impact they want.
I think this is a good move on Adobe’s part. Most traditional VCs aren’t going to be interested in encouraging Adobe’s cross-platform technology per-se, but an Adobe fund can. Adobe is interested not only in the success of the startup they invest in, but also the adoption rate of their technology–by developers and end-users. This is not the case with a typical VC. A VC doesn’t necessarily care if a product is implemented using Java or the .NET platform or now Apollo. They want the company to pick what makes sense. Now Adobe wants the same thing–however, if you pick Apollo, then they’ll be interested, potentially financially.
At quick glance at your title made me think “WTF? Who wants $100”. You may want to fix that 😉
What a whole $100, wow! Are they expecting change back?
Ooops. Thanks for catching the mistake in the title! $100 million is more like it.