In the past 20 years, Qualcomm Ventures has invested in nearly 80 companies in China. — Reuters
SHANGHAI: Qualcomm Ventures, the venture capital arm of US chip heavyweight Qualcomm Inc, will step up its push to invest in promising Chinese startups to support their growth, with a focus on smart driving, artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse this year.
Shen Jin, managing director of Qualcomm Ventures, said the company’s investment theme at this stage is intelligent interconnection, with priorities including intelligent driving, AI and its applications in the Internet of Things, robot solutions and computer vision in advanced manufacturing, as well as the metaverse.
Founded in 2000, Qualcomm Ventures is a veteran in the corporate venture capital market and has been actively investing in China since 2003.
From investing in mobile internet technologies in the past to investing in smart Internet now, Qualcomm Ventures aims to help its parent company build its business ecosystem and expand its partners, while constantly seeking a balance between industrial ecological value and financial returns, forming a unique investment style.
In the past 20 years, Qualcomm Ventures has invested in nearly 80 companies in China.
“From 2010 to 2015, our investment theme was mobile Internet.
“At that time, in addition to investing in companies that had become close partners with Qualcomm, such as smartphone maker Xiaomi, we also invested in companies such as bike-sharing enterprise Mobike whose business seems to have no close ties with Qualcomm.
“But the investment idea was to promote the ecology of 3G and 4G,” Shen said in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald.
He said that this year, the company will maintain its efforts to invest in China. Qualcomm set up a US$100mil (RM436mil) investment fund for the metaverse last year.
The metaverse is an immersive virtual world facilitated by virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies.
“The fund was officially opened in June 2022 and after that, we have made some investments in companies around the world.
“We have invested in a health platform called Tripp, which mainly uses immersive technologies to help people track their health and emotional management through meditation. At the same time, we have also invested in the AR/VR cloud platform Echo3D.
“In addition, we will soon announce that we will invest in a metaverse company in China,” Shen added.
He said China has begun to warm up for the commercial use of the metaverse. — China Daily/ANN
