Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Intel Capital announces 12 start-up bets in AI, Cloud, IoT and Silicon

Intel Capital announced investments totalling $72 million in a dozen start-up companies focused in AI, cloud, IoT and silicon technologies.

This week the company is hosting an Intel Capital Global Summit in Palm Desert, California to bring together startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and tech industry executives.

The 12 startups joining Intel Capital’s portfolio are:

Artificial Intelligence

Avaamo (Los Altos, California) 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. http://www.avaamo.com/

Fictiv (San Francisco, California) 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. https://www.fictiv.com/



Gamalon (Cambridge, Massachusetts) 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. https://gamalon.com/

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. http://www.reconova.com/en/index.html

Syntiant (Irvine, California) 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. https://www.syntiant.com/

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. http://www.alauda.cn/?lang=EN

CloudGenix (San Jose, California) 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. https://www.cloudgenix.com/

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. https://www.espressif.com/

VenueNext (Santa Clara, California) 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 include Levi’s Stadium, Yankee Stadium, U.S. Bank Stadium, Amway Center, Churchill Downs and St. Luke’s Health Systems. http://www.venuenext.com/#welcome

Silicon

Lyncean Technologies (Fremont, California) 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. http://lynceantech.com/

Movellus (San Jose, California) 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. https://www.movellus.com/

SiFive (San Mateo, California) 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. https://www.sifive.com/