Sinclair Digital Ventures

Sinclair Digital Ventures (SDV) is the Seattle-headquartered corporate venture capital division of Sinclair Broadcast Group — now Sinclair, Inc. (NASDAQ: SBGI), one of the largest US local television broadcasters. Announced in March 2015 under the leadership of Managing Director Scott Shapiro, SDV was created to constantly evaluate emerging digital technology and content, making build-buy-or-invest recommendations on behalf of the broadcast parent. Unlike a purely financial VC, SDV's differentiated value proposition rested on its ability to execute commercial agreements granting portfolio companies access to Sinclair's national broadcast scale — a lever unavailable to independent investors. SDV deployed seed- and Series A-stage growth equity and considered strategic acquisitions where material benefit to Sinclair's core operations existed. Target sectors included mobile, content, distribution, ad tech, SaaS, data and analytics, media, e-commerce, social media, and advertising and marketing. Across 10 investments, the most recent documented deal was Octopus (in-taxi entertainment and advertising, Series B, August 2019), which was also the fund's last documented exit in January 2022. The standalone SDV entity is now marked as permanently closed and has been succeeded by the broader Sinclair Ventures platform spanning the minority-owned investment portfolio, Tennis Channel, Digital Remedy ad tech, and the Dielectric antenna business. In September 2025 Sinclair Ventures appointed Craig Blank — a 20-year veteran most recently at Woodland Management and Partners Edge Fund — as Principal overseeing the minority-owned portfolio. SDV's operational history illustrates both the opportunity and the limitation of broadcast-affiliated CVCs: national distribution access is a genuine advantage, but a narrow media parent constrains the fund's ability to follow portfolio companies into non-media adjacencies.