Qualcomm Ventures Is Investing $100M In AI Startups

Chipmaker Qualcomm has claimed that it will be dedicating $100 million to AI (artificial intelligence) investments. In particular, the venture capital arm of the company - Qualcomm Ventures - will invest in the early stage of startups developing on-device AI, instead of the cloud.

According to Albert Wang, investment director of Qualcomm, the use of AI on end devices such as vehicles or smartphone is the future. Wang will be in charge of the first investment out of this hundred-million fund.

Albert Wang

Talking with Tech Crunch, Wang said that AI processing relies on computation intensively. For instance, as you’re speaking to Alexa, your device does not process anything; Alexa, in fact, takes the data to the cloud and scrunch it there.

This process results in several problems namely performance deterioration, large bandwidth requirement, as well as privacy issues. Imagine you live with an Alexa that assures more privacy and is more friendly, as you make the questions and answers come at once, no time-consuming process.

Previously, Qualcomm has invested into AI out of its evergreen venture investment, consisting of SenseTime – a Chinese firm working on facial recognition and GM-acquired Cruise - a company developing autonomous driving technology based on AI. The first investment of AI fund was in AnyVision, a Tel Aviv based startup specialized in developing technology to recognize faces, bodies, and objects. Qualcomm took part in the startup’s Series A funding round in July, calling for $28 million and led by Bosch.

Annually, a total of 12 to 15 startups receive investments from the corporate venture capital. The corporate can't tell the exact number of AI companies it will invest in, but it does say each deal can range from $1 to $10 million.

Qualcomm actually chooses to raise fund behind its evergreen flagship vehicle instead of establishing specialized funds by setting aside parts of its capital. Yet, the company did set up a fund specialized in healthcare. Regarding AI, Qualcomm brings a special set of resources.

According to Wang, Qualcomm is proving its success in the field of mobiles and gaining its own place on the Internet of Thing space so it can provide many technology partnerships, a lot of tech insight from both software and hardware perspective. In short, the chipmaker has a significant source of firms.