Exclusive: Counterpart Ventures closes $132 million third fund to link CVCs and startups

Counterpart Ventures was conceived over fried chicken and “therapy” sessions.

If that’s an exaggeration, it’s only a slight one: As Patrick Eggen and Joe Saijo—previously of Qualcomm Ventures and Recruit Strategic Partners respectively—were in 2016 considering starting Counterpart specifically to work with in-house, corporate venture firms, or CVCs, the two met over and over at Farmerbrown, a noted San Francisco soul food restaurant (now closed, but lovingly remembered). These “fried chicken chats” were for Counterpart business strategy, said Eggen, while they had an endless string of “coffee shot” meetings with sometimes-beleaguered CVCs. 

“It was all about these one-on-one meetings,” said Eggen, now founding general partner with Saijo. “It was all about these relationships. And I had hundreds of these meetings—I call them coffee shots—where I was giving therapy to CVCs. How do I get deals done? Oh my God, my CFO left, what do I do now? Some accounting bobbleheads—they don’t understand venture investments, legal eagles, PR police, all that.”

These early “therapy sessions” turned into Counterpart Ventures, which has made its name connecting founders to a broad ecosystem of more than 650 CVCs and 1500 investors. The firm, founded in 2018, has now raised its third fund of $132 million, up from the $110 million Counterpart raised in 2021 for its fund two, Fortune can exclusively report. Counterpart, which currently has a five person team, makes investments in startups like Invent.ai and Oxide, helping them connect to CVCs as customers, partners, and capital providers. Amid the AI boom, CVC influence has perhaps never been more important. 

“The lazy sentiment by most VCs is that CVCs are slow, bureaucratic, don’t help and suck time out of startups,” said Eggen. “That they’re tourists. But guess what? Roughly one-third of startups in the U.S. have a CVC on their cap table. This year, roughly half of deal value is represented by corporates. Now, granted, that’s driven a lot by these monster AI deals, but it shows the proof is in the pudding.” 

Corporates have been big-ticket investors in AI’s biggest names over the last couple years, a trend that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere to judge by moves like Microsoft’s blockbuster investment into OpenAI and Alphabet’s double-down on Waymo. PitchBook estimates CVC participation has consistently lingered around 21% over the last decade in terms of deal count. Over the years, CVC participation in deal value has skewed upwards, hitting 56.1% in 2024 bolstered by AI, according to a 2025 PitchBook report. 

“We think we’re hitting our stride, because fund three will focus on unlocking our community value, our corporate value to founders,” Eggen told Fortune. “Because that’s how we win deals, that’s how we raise another fund. That’s how we show real quantifiable value to founders.”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com