On May 8, Intel announced an investment of more than US$72 million in 12 startups at its Investment Global Summit. With this investment, Intel's total investment in 2018 has exceeded US$115 million.
These 12 startups come from the three major fields of artificial intelligence, cloud and Internet of Things, and chip technology. Among them are three companies from China: fabless semiconductor company Espressif, container services and enterprise-level PaaS startup Lingqueyun, and visual perception products and solutions provider Ruiwei Technology.
These new startups that have joined Intel’s portfolio are currently focusing on application scenarios including:
—conversational computing based on artificial intelligence that accelerates the design of virtual assistants;
—context-aware applications that can enhance user experience in stadiums, themes experiences in parks, hotels, and even hospitals;
—a new processor that brings machine learning capabilities to mobile devices, and more.
Wendell Brooks, Intel Senior Vice President and President of Intel Capital, said: "These new innovative companies fully demonstrate Intel's data-centric development strategy. They are shaping the future of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and The future, the future of the Internet of Things and the future of chip technology.”
Bi Wende also pointed out that this new batch of investments also reflects Intel Capital’s new strategy, which is to increase the amount of single investment. He said: "Whether it is providing Intel technology, introducing it to our global partners, or providing engineering technology resources, we are doing our best to help these startups achieve greater success."
At the scene, Bi Wende shared According to a set of data, two-thirds of Intel's total investment in startup companies in 2017 was outside the United States.
A founder of an invested company told Jiemian News at the scene that the reason for choosing Intel was mainly due to its advantages in the field of artificial intelligence. "We can leverage Intel's leading technologies in artificial intelligence and 5G to develop more intelligent, versatile and cost-effective high-performance solutions."
In October last year, Intel invested in 15 startups, with a total amount of more than 60 million US dollars. , covering many fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and autonomous machines, including Horizon Technology, a Chinese artificial intelligence chip startup.
It is worth mentioning that since Intel began investing in China in 1998, Intel has invested in more than 140 Chinese technology companies, totaling more than 1.9 billion US dollars, of which nearly 40 companies have been listed or acquired. For Intel, key investment areas include artificial intelligence, driverless technology, virtual reality technology, 5G, cloud computing, big data analysis, etc.
At the same time, at this Intel Capital Global Summit, the NBA and Intel Capital announced the launch of an "NBA + Intel Capital" innovation plan targeting the sports and entertainment industry. The program will identify technology companies that will impact the future of NBA, sports and entertainment and provide strong support to these companies during their creation and development.
Bi Wende said, "Due to the explosive growth of sports digitization and data, there have been more technological disruptions in the past five years than in the previous 70 years combined." Nonetheless, he believes that current innovations are just the tip of the iceberg. With the deployment of 5G networks and the continuous improvement of artificial intelligence, immersive and real-time experiences will be realized.
In addition, Intel Capital also announced that it has completed the diversity investment goal set in 2015 - "investing US$125 million to support female and minority-led startups" two and a half years ahead of schedule.
The following is a brief introduction to the 12 newly announced portfolio companies of Intel Capital:
Artificial Intelligence:
Avaamo (Los Altos, California, USA): is a deep learning software company dedicated to the development of conversational computing interfaces to solve Enterprise-specific key issues. The basic artificial intelligence technology being developed by Avaamo integrates a wide range of fields such as neural networks, speech synthesis, and deep learning to make enterprise-level conversational computing a reality.
Fictiv (, San Francisco, California, ): is lowering the barriers to manufacturing and revolutionizing the way hardware teams design, develop and deliver physical products.Its virtual manufacturing platform integrates intelligent workflow and collaboration software with Fictiv's curated global network of manufacturers. From prototyping to production, Fictiv helps hardware teams work more efficiently and bring products to market faster.
Gamalon (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA): is leading the next wave of machine learning . Its artificial intelligence platform can train computers to learn to think for themselves. Gamalon's Idea Learning technology enables precise, editable and interpretable processing of customer information and other forms of data. Gamalon's system learns faster, is easily scalable to specific domains, is fully auditable, and is capable of understanding complexity and nuance. It can be used to build free-form text such as surveys, chat transcripts, trouble tickets, etc.
Ruiwei Technology (Xiamen, China): It is one of the industry's leading providers of visual perception products and solutions. Ruiwei focuses on the research of visual perception technology and has a number of core patented technologies in the fields of machine learning and computer vision . The company has rich product design and delivery capabilities, and has achieved large-scale product applications in smart retail, smart home appliances, smart security and other fields.
Syntiant (Irvine, California, USA): It is an artificial intelligence semiconductor company that is accelerating the transformation of machine learning from cloud to edge devices. The company's neural decision processor combines deep learning and semiconductor design to provide high-efficiency, ultra-low-power analog neural computing for always-on battery-powered devices, including mobile phones, wearable devices, smart sensors, and drones.
Cloud and Internet of Things:
Lingqueyun (Beijing, China): It is a leader in the field of container services and enterprise-level PaaS. It is committed to helping enterprise IT gain the core capabilities of continuous innovation in the digital era. By helping enterprises build PaaS platforms based on container technology, quickly build cloud-native applications, and implement DevOps best practices, we can modernize the application architecture and make the development process agile for enterprise customers. Currently, Lingqueyun is helping corporate customers in finance, manufacturing, energy, aviation, automobiles and other fields to successfully achieve digital transformation.
CloudGenix (Santa Clara, California, USA): is a leader in software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), transforming traditional hardware wide area networks into software-based application-defined networks. Using CloudGenix software, customers can deploy cloud, unified communications and data center applications to remote offices through high-performance and high-security broadband networks. CloudGenix saves customers up to 70% of WAN costs, improves application user experience, and increases application and network stability uptime by more than 10 times.
Espressif Systems (Shanghai, China): It is a global fabless semiconductor company that is deeply involved in the field of wireless computing technology and is committed to developing smarter, multi-purpose and cost-effective high-performance solutions for the Internet of Things. The Wi-Fi+BT/BLE dual-mode system chip (SoC) developed by Espressif is widely used in various IoT products such as tablets, cameras, wearables and smart home devices at very competitive prices.
VenueNext (Santa Clara, CA, USA): is transforming the way people experience places—from stadiums and concert halls to hotels and hospitals. Its smart place platform connects the independent operating systems of the place together, allowing users to seamlessly use the services provided by the place through their smartphones, and at the same time, it can provide these places with real-time data analysis and insights to drive business change. Its clients include: Levi's Stadium, Yankee Stadium, U.S. Bank Stadium, Amway Center, Churchill Circus and St. Luke's Health System.
Chip Technology:
Lyncean Technologies (Fremont, California, USA): Founded in 2001, it is committed to developing the Compact Light Source (CLS), a miniature synchrotron X-ray source. By shrinking the size 200 times, this compact light source can shrink a machine used for synchrotron mass testing from the size of a stadium to the size of a room. Lyncean's latest development is a new EUV source based on coherent photon generation, a compact electron storage ring designed for high-volume manufacturing of semiconductor lithography.
Movellus ( San Jose, California, USA): Develops semiconductor technology that allows digital tools to automatically create and implement functions previously only possible with custom analog designs. By using digital design, Movellus improves the efficiency of creating and laying out analog circuits for system-on-chips (SoCs), resulting in shorter design times, faster qualified yields, smaller die sizes and lower failure rates. Movellus' customers include semiconductor and systems companies in the fields of artificial intelligence, networking and FPGAs.
SiFive (San Mateo, California, USA): It is a leading supplier of fast-to-market processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Founded by the inventor of RISC-V and led by a team of industry veterans, SoC system designers can use SiFive's technology to develop customizable open-architecture processor cores that reduce time to market and cost.
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