Why are VC firms such a big thing? aren't they just basically private equity firms? So much so that even surprising companies like SPH has their own Venture CAP?

Venture Capital is one of the asset classes that can bring to you outsized returns (100%) compared to traditional capital markets like trading in stocks or ETFs (~single digit growth % a year). Venture Capital has been hyped due to a few reasons:

1) Cult of Personality: Many start-ups have chartered the turbulent waters of entrepreneurship with a strong leader (think Uber or Twitter). These two companies are success stories which catapulted their companies to rock star-like status. This gives their bankrollers a lot of publicity when they see an "exit" on their investment. Which leads me to my next point...

2) Start-up to IPO: The US public markets love a good tech stock going public because they're growth stocks that look "sexy" and keep up with the times. Not only that, early round investors in start-ups that go to the IPO stage get outsized returns on investment (i.e. the return is flipped multiple times and become liquid as a stock on the public markets).

3) Corporate Venture Capital: Many MNCs have Venture Capital arms as an investment and/or a R&D strategy. The former would be to gain a good IRR as the valuations of their investments grow from A round to B round and etcetera. The latter is basically an R&D strategy where they invest in start-ups that help to augment their current technology.

4) Fund Mandate: This means the investment theses of the fund. Some VCs are the early stage investment funds that invest for fund returns. Some VCs are corporate VCs which are the VC arms of MNCs; these funds can be for returns or to gain fresh tech from investments not within their immediate purview.

Hope this answers your question!

Speaking from the perspective of someone who has been in VC for around a decade, I do think that the term 'venture capitalist' has become more sexy in the last decade especially with the boom in early-mid stage technology companies.

Which also means that as valuations of tech companies grew and made huge exits, VC firms benefitted, and grew from that to raise Fund II, Fund III, so on and so forth. VC/PEs are essentially funds that look to invest in private companies, with the aim to get a good ROI.

Sometimes, corporates have a VC arm as well. It could act as a way for the company to look outside its core area of expertise, and see what are adjacant sectors it could invest in to help them grow. It could also be exploratory - to see what new technologies are there that could potentially disrupt their business. I did notice that many corporates were starting to have their own 'VC' arms too - even Challenger did back in 2015!