Who's The Shopaholic? Google Or Facebook?

Bridezillas stampeding for wedding dresses is nothing compared to the shopping frenzy going on in Silicon Valley. Shopaholics Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) have been loading up on start-ups.

Shopping Sprees

The gurus at Google Ventures, in which Google is sole limited partner, on Wednesday drove six Uber cars (one of their more successful projects) throughout Silicon Valley, picking up entrepreneurs and giving them the ride of a lifetime, a chance to pitch their game changer. They got "seven minutes in heaven" to pitch -- and then a likely seven in hell for critique.

Google Ventures has built a portfolio of 225 companies since 2009, and it averaged more than one angel investor deal a week in 2013. Searching whogotfunded.com, it looks like Google Ventures is on a similar torrid pace this year. For Google, the $300 million it tossed to Google Ventures is but a drop in the bucket for a company that brought in $59 billion in revenue this last year and has $57 billion in cash. Google Ventures expects to invest $1.5 billion over the next five years, with Google adding an additional $300 million to this year's Google Ventures coffers. In January, Google bought Nest, a smart thermostat and smoke alarm company that was a Google Ventures project, for $3.2 billion.

Facebook bought Oculus Media, a company funded on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform, for $2.3 billion. Oculus makes virtual reality headwear. This follows the What's App purchase for $19 billion in stock earlier this year and the wildly popular Instagram for $1 billion in stock two years ago.

Read the full article at Daily Finance.

Annalisa Kraft has no position in these companies.

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