Qualcomm Ventures:
A Year in Review 2023

Despite the economic hurdles that marked 2023, the tech industry remained resilient demonstrating continued innovation, growth and opportunity propelled by advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Qualcomm Ventures celebrated 23 years of investing in the tech ecosystem to enable intelligent, power-efficient computing everywhere. And we remained focused on executing our mission to support visionary founders build revolutionary businesses.

We welcomed 12 new companies to our global portfolio. Several of our companies had exits, including ideaForge, a full stack high performance UAV company which had a successful IPO in India, and OmniML, a neural architecture search and optimization platform provider which was acquired. We’re honored to have been a part of their journey.

The tech industry also experienced a significant turning point as generative AI moved from concept to mainstream adoption across diverse sectors and applications. As an active investor in AI, we deepened our focus on this evolving technology and broadened our investment thesis to include generative AI. We held an Edge AI Summit, bringing together technology experts, Qualcomm execs and the startup ecosystem to discuss the latest advancements in on-device AI. We believe that for large-scale deployment and adoption of generative AI to occur, it needs to be running on devices. Our most recent investment in Hugging Face, the leading machine learning collaboration platform, fits well with this thesis.

The automotive sector continued its digital transformation, with modern vehicles quickly becoming connected and intelligent. To that end, we invested in companies enabling vehicle connectivity and communications.

• Ethernovia, a provider of ethernet solutions for vehicle communication, and
• Cavli Wireless, a connectivity management technology provider.

The combination of AI and IoT ushered in new opportunities. With on-device AI processing, the collection and analysis of massive amounts of data can be done more efficiently and in more actionable ways. This use of edge AI drove innovation and transformation across verticals such as real estate, public security, energy and logistics. Our recent IoT investments include:

• Butlr, a wireless occupancy-sensing platform provider,
• Gabriel, a security-tech startup and provider of smart AI-powered cameras,
• SPAN, a smart-electric panel provider, and
• Verity, an autonomous drone inventory management solution company.

The future of AI is hybrid, with processing done in the cloud and on the device. As generative AI adoption grows and drives higher demand for computing, AI processing needs a distributed architecture to help coordinate AI workloads among the cloud and edge devices—this is critical for AI to scale and reach its full potential. Our investment in Spectro Cloud, a Kubernetes management platform for enterprises, is helping simplify this process and enabling edge AI to become a reality.

We are incredibly proud of our portfolio companies and their perseverance and fortitude this past year. Below are a few notable milestones achieved by our portfolio. 

• Humane, a startup building an AI hardware and services platform, launched their AI pin.
• Wiliot, an ambient IoT data carrier platform company, and Airspace, a tech-enabled logistics service provider, made the Fast Co’s 2023 Next Big Things in Tech list.
• Weka.io, a big-data platform provider, and Tabnine, an AI-powered code completion tool maker named 50 most promising Israeli startups.
• Ultraviolette Automotive, a leader in sustainable mobility, launched an EV Racing platform.
• Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML Ops platform provider, made Forbes AI 50 list.

Looking ahead, we’re excited for what the new year will bring and investing in category-leading companies that leverage Qualcomm’s technology to redefine our everyday experiences. We extend our appreciation to our portfolio companies, co-investors, and partners for their shared commitment to our journey. Here’s to fostering further collaboration in 2024 and continuing to drive the transformation of every industry and growth of the digital economy!