Google Ventures rebrands as GV

Google Ventures, the venture capital business which has an investment portfolio including Uber and Nest, is rebranding as GV.

GV was founded in 2009 and backs start-up tech business with seed funding and growth funding. Some of the areas it invests in include life science and health, data and AI, and robotics.

This year it backed 34 companies, dropping from 57 companies in 2014. Today the Financial Times reported that GV’s chief executive Bill Marris has said that the amount of money being sunk into investment businesses has made it a more costly market “[and caused] negotiating leverage to move to the entrepreneurs”.

The rebranding of GV also follows Google rebranding at the corporate level. In August Google Inc became Alphabet.

Moving away from Google

It appears that Google is starting to differentiate its businesses and as a rebranding exercise GV’s new name will help it disassociate from the internet side of the business.

Marris was keen to underline the differences between GV and Google in his comments to the FT: “My interests are aligned with entrepreneurs and the other shareholders and not Google.”

The new GV brand features a logo with a cutaway V, which is used as a cut away device across the rest of the brand.

GV was unable to comment on its rebrand at the time of publication.