BASF Venture Capital’s function is to provide the chemical giant BASF with strategic partnerships and to deliver high yields. Its mission is ‘to link the strategic and operational interests of BASF Group with innovative technologies of emerging businesses’. It typically invests between €1m-€5m in start-up companies with innovations in the same business sectors as BASF: chemicals, plastics and ‘performance products’. But it is also interested in anything to do with energy management, biotechnology and nanotechnology. Its prerequisites for investment include having skilled management; ‘proof of concept’; a strong business model; and keenness to cooperate with BASF. Part of what is offers is collaboration with other business in its portfolio as well as access to its own research network and its experience of scaling up products and processes to reach global markets. BASF posted sales of more than €62bn in 2008.