Intel Capital announced that it had surpassed its $125 million commitment to invest in diverse startups.
“More than 10 percent of our entire portfolio is now led by entrepreneurs from these communities, which we believe is an essential part of making the tech industry more inclusive for everyone’s benefit,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital.
Additionally, it announced it would invest $72 million in 12 tech startups at their Intel Capital Global Summit. These companies are driving advancements in AI, cloud, IoT and silicon technologies.
Intel Capital President Wendell Brooks presents at the 18th annual Intel Capital Global Summit in Palm Desert on Tuesday, May 8, 2018. The 2018 Intel Capital Global Summit takes place May 8-10 in Palm Desert, California. (Credit: Intel Corp.)
In addition to these startups, Intel Capital has been heavily focused on diversity. So far in 2018, Intel Capital has closed six follow-on investments in companies led by diverse teams. This is more than 20 percent of the 27 investments total made YTD. In addition, Intel Capital has a robust investment pipeline of new and follow-on diversity investments under active consideration. This brings Intel Capital’s YTD investments to more than $115 million. Additionally, the company has a total of $127 million invested in diverse-led startups, to-date.
“These innovative companies reflect Intel’s strategic focus as a data leader,” said Wendell Brooks, senior vice president of Intel Corp. and president of Intel Capital, in a recent press release. “They’re helping shape the future of artificial intelligence, the future of the cloud and the Internet of Things, and the future of silicon. These are critical areas of technology as the world becomes increasingly connected and smart.”
In 2015, Intel pledged to invest $125 million in startups run by women and underrepresented minorities by 2020. They’ve surpassed that by investing $127 million since its inception. The total diversity portfolio, which includes investments before June 2015, now stands at $270 million in 49 companies. The company is continuing to seek out global companies founded and/or led by women and entrepreneurs living with disabilities, and U.S. companies founded and/or led by underrepresented minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, and U.S. military veterans.
The 12 Startups
Future of Artificial Intelligence
Avaamo* (Los Altos, California, U.S.) is a deep learning software company that specializes in conversational interfaces to solve specific, high-impact problems in the enterprise. Avaamo is building fundamental AI technology across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis, and deep learning to make conversational computing for the enterprise a reality.
Fictiv* (San Francisco, California, U.S.) is democratizing access to manufacturing, transforming how hardware teams design, develop and deliver physical products. Its virtual manufacturing platform pairs intelligent workflow and collaboration software with Fictiv’s global network of highly vetted manufacturers. From prototype to production, Fictiv helps hardware teams work efficiently and bring products to market faster.
Gamalon* (Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.) is leading the next wave in machine learning with an AI platform that teaches computers actual ideas. Gamalon’s Idea Learning technology provides accurate, editable, and explainable processing of customer messages and other free-form data. Gamalon’s system learns faster, is easily extendable to specific domains, is completely auditable, and understands complexity and nuance. It can be used to structure free-form text such as surveys, chat transcripts, trouble tickets, and more.
Reconova* (Xiamen, China) is a leading AI company providing cutting-edge visual perception solutions. Dedicated to the research of innovative computer vision and machine learning technologies, Reconova possesses a significant amount of core technologies in those fields. The company has achieved scale production and application across the smart retail, smart home, and intelligent security segments.
Syntiant* (Irvine, California, U.S.) is an AI semiconductor company that is accelerating the transition of machine learning from the cloud to edge devices. The company’s neural decision processors merge deep learning with semiconductor design to produce highly efficient ultralow-power analog neural computation for always-on applications in battery-powered devices, including mobile phones, wearable devices, smart sensors, and drones.
Future of Cloud and IoT
Alauda* (Beijing, China) is a container-based cloud services provider empowering enterprise IT with its enterprise platform-as-a-service offering and other strategic services. It delivers cloud-native capabilities and DevOps best practices to help enterprises modernize application architecture, maximize developer productivity and achieve operational excellence. Alauda serves organizations undergoing digital transformation across a number of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, aviation, energy and automotive.
CloudGenix* (San Jose, California, U.S.) is a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) leader, transforming legacy hardware WANs into a software-based, application-defined fabric. Using CloudGenix software, customers deploy cloud, unified communications and data center applications to remote offices over broadband networks with high performance and security. CloudGenix customers experience up to 70 percent WAN costs savings, an improved user experience for their applications, and more than 10x improvements in application and network uptime.
Espressif Systems* (Shanghai, China) is a multinational, fabless semiconductor company that leverages wireless computing to create high-performance IoT solutions that are more intelligent, versatile and cost-effective. The company’s all-in-one system-on-chips (SoCs) provide dual-mode connectivity (Wi-Fi+BT/BLE) to a wide range of IoT products – including tablets, cameras, wearables and smart home devices – at competitive prices.
VenueNext* (Santa Clara, California, U.S.) transforms the way guests experience every kind of venue, from arenas and concert halls to hotels and hospitals. Its smart-venue platform connects a facility’s siloed operational systems to give guests seamless access to services via their smartphones and provides real-time analytics and insights that transform business outcomes. A sample of customers includes Levi’s Stadium*, Yankee Stadium*, U.S. Bank Stadium*, Amway Center*, Churchill Downs* and St. Luke’s Health Systems*.
Future of Silicon
Lyncean Technologies* (Fremont, California, U.S.) was founded in 2001 to develop the Compact Light Source (CLS), a miniature synchrotron X-ray source. Enabling a reduction in scale by a factor of 200, the CLS shrinks a machine capable of synchrotron quality experiments from stadium-sized to room-sized. Lyncean’s newest development is a novel EUV source based on coherent photon generation in a compact electron storage ring, specifically designed for high-volume manufacturing semiconductor lithography.
Movellus* (San Jose, California, U.S.) develops semiconductor technologies that enable digital tools to automatically create and implement functionality previously achievable only with custom analog design. Using digital design, Movellus improves the efficiency of creating and laying out analog circuits for SoCs – resulting in faster design time, faster time to yield, smaller die size and lower failure rates. Movellus’ customers include semiconductor and systems companies in the AI, networking and FPGA segments.
SiFive* (San Mateo, California, U.S.) is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V and led by a team of industry veterans, SiFive helps system-on-chip designers reduce time to market and increase cost savings by enabling system designers to produce customized, open-architecture processor cores.
Intel believes that these 12 new companies will help change the future of computing. “We are planting seeds,” said Brooks, “that will grow for decades.”
