How This Corporate VC Invests in 30+ Startups: $200K–$2M Checks (Asia)

Most founders assume corporate venture capital works like traditional VC,  just slower, more political, and wrapped in “strategic” buzzwords. After sitting down with Andy Cheng, it’s clear that the assumption misses the point.

This conversation shows how some corporates use their balance sheet very differently. Not just to chase financial returns, but to intentionally build customers, partnerships, and long-term runway, often before a formal investment even happens.

In the video “How This Corporate VC Invests in 30+ Startups”, we unpack a side of corporate investing most founders never get to see. This isn’t about exits or IRR first. It’s about customers, cloud usage, and long-term partnerships, all designed well before capital is deployed.

Andy shares how capital, infrastructure, and relationships are combined on purpose to create alignment and runway — not just financial exposure.

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Beyond “CVC vs VC”

Andy leads investment strategy at GrandTech Cloud Services, a publicly listed cloud company in Taiwan and a Managed Service Partner (MSP) for AWS and Google Cloud.

Here’s the key difference:

GrandTech doesn’t start with capital.

They start with startups as customers.

While most cloud providers chase enterprise contracts, GrandTech is built around early-stage and growth-stage startups, and everything flows from that.

Their approach is simple, but rare:

They combine cloud infrastructure + balance-sheet capital + ecosystem access into a single operating model.

This isn’t venture capital bolted onto a corporate balance sheet. It’s venture capital embedded directly into how the company grows.

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What GrandTech Actually Does

To understand GrandTech’s investment behavior, you first have to understand its core business. GrandTech Cloud Services is not a traditional VC and not a corporate running a side investment arm. It’s a publicly listed cloud services company that works closely with startups as customers long before any capital conversation begins. As an MSP for AWS and Google Cloud, GrandTech sits directly inside a startup’s infrastructure stack — seeing usage patterns, growth trajectories, and operational maturity in real time.

That proximity changes how they invest. Instead of meeting founders for the first time in a pitch meeting, GrandTech often builds relationships through cloud usage, technical collaboration, and long-term operational support. By the time capital is discussed, trust, alignment, and customer value are already established.

From the conversation, a few concrete takeaways stood out:

• Invested in 30+ startups in Taiwan, 5–10 across Southeast Asia, and one in Japan

• Typical investment stage: Pre-A to Pre-C

• Check sizes usually range from $200K to $2M+

• Beyond startups, they also allocate capital to 4–5 GPs to expand deal flow and ecosystem access

• In certain cases, they intentionally invest at higher valuations when long-term customer relationships and strategic alignment outweigh pure financial returns

This isn’t accidental behavior. It’s a deliberate strategy built around long-term engagement, not short-term wins.

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Capital That’s Designed for Relationships

The key difference in GrandTech’s model is how success is measured. This isn’t capital optimized purely for exits or IRR. It’s capital designed to support relationships that compound over time.

Their investments are structured to:

• Secure long-term startup customers

• Deepen cloud usage and retention

• Create partnership density across the ecosystem

• Extend startup runway in non-obvious but meaningful ways

As Andy shared during the conversation, they’re not really selling cloud credits. They’re selling time to execute.

When cloud usage discounts, balance-sheet capital, and ecosystem partnerships are bundled together, a startup’s runway quietly extends, sometimes without a traditional funding round, press announcement, or valuation discussion.

For founders, this kind of support can be just as impactful as raising capital, especially in capital-efficient or infrastructure-heavy businesses.

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An Important Signal for Founders

One subtle but powerful insight for founders:

If your startup’s cloud usage fees are already significant, that spend itself can become a signal, and sometimes a pathway to investment.

In GrandTech’s case, investing in customers isn’t a conflict.

It’s the point.

Higher cloud usage + long-term alignment can justify capital deployment, even at valuations a traditional VC might hesitate on.

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The Real Takeaway

For founders pitching corporate investors, and for corporates thinking seriously about how to deploy balance-sheet capital, this conversation offers a practical, grounded look at what happens when capital, cloud, and collaboration are designed as one system, not three disconnected tools.

This is what corporate venture looks like when it’s intentional. Not as a side project. Not as an innovation lab experiment. But as infrastructure for long-term growth.

If you’re building a startup in Asia, selling into cloud-heavy environments, or exploring strategic capital beyond traditional VC, this is a conversation worth paying attention to.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on my YouTube channel to see how this model works in practice.

And a big thank you to Andy Cheng for openly sharing how GrandTech thinks about capital, customers, and partnerships, and for pulling back the curtain on a model most founders rarely get to see from the inside.