Venture capital is shifting from just funding disruptors to acquiring incumbent businesses, like a nonprofit health system. This provides a real-world environment for their portfolio startups to deploy and scale AI solutions, bypassing traditional enterprise sales cycles.

Rather than inventing from scratch, InMedx licensed its advanced heart-rate variability algorithm from Omega Wave, a company serving pro sports teams. This allowed them to leverage a proven, precise technology and focus their resources on the higher-value activities of clinical validation and securing FDA clearance for medical use.

To encourage adoption of tech benefiting multiple business units, Oshkosh's CVC arm uses a central budget to fund initial proofs of concept. This removes the "who pays?" friction, as no single department has to bear the initial cost for a company-wide benefit, with the successful unit paying later.

Rather than allowing siloed AI experiments, Boehringer Ingelheim uses a centralized "AI innovation team." This overarching function supports the entire enterprise, pilots ideas to "fail fast or scale up," ensures compliance, and builds economies of scale.

Unlike venture creation firms that generate ideas internally, Curie.bio operates on a 'Freedom for Founders' principle. It believes the best ideas come from external innovators and its role is to augment them with capital-efficient support, fractional expertise, and operational help to translate those ideas into companies.

In rapidly changing industries, a standalone M&A strategy is insufficient. Combine it with a corporate venture capital (CVC) program to evaluate whether to acquire current technology or make smaller investments in emerging, potentially disruptive companies, providing valuable market intelligence for future M&A decisions.

UPMC Enterprises identifies clinical areas where its parent health system is not at the frontier. It then deliberately seeks external investments in those specific areas to bring in new technologies and expertise, rather than only investing in existing internal strengths.

For life sciences startups, UPMC's model shows that an integrated payer-provider views expensive therapies not just as a line-item cost but as a potential long-term saving. They calculate value based on reducing other system costs like hospital stays, supplemental drugs, or future procedures.

In a fast-moving field like cybersecurity, it's impossible to build everything in-house. By treating M&A as an extension of the R&D department, a large company can leverage the venture-backed ecosystem to acquire innovative teams and products that are already validated.