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Corporate venturing has become a vehicle to access distributed knowledge and transform it into new business opportunities. Drawing on absorptive capacity, ambidexterity, and corporate venturing literature, we use a multiple case-study approach to examine the relationship between firms’ absorptive capacity and learning outcomes regarding exploration and exploitation. Our case study of 15 startup programs and their various setups to acquire knowledge shows that we can categorize firms’ engagement with startups regarding the firm’s overall objective, mediating organization's absorptive capacity, and the learning outcomes with regards to exploration and exploitation. We contribute by identifying new ways of explorative and exploitative learning by integrating startups´ knowledge and significantly expand our knowledge about absorptive capacity and ambidexterity in the light of startup collaboration.