Qualcomm to invest $150 million in Indian startups

U.S.-based chipmaker Qualcomm announced that it will be investing $150 million in Indian startups following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with heads of Silicon Valley’s technology firms heads, reports IANS. Executive chairman Paul Jacobs made the announcement at the Digital Economy event in San Jose over the weekend and said the venture fund was in support of the government’s Digital India and Make in India initiatives.

The company said it would invest in IOT startups, without being more specific about which ones how much and by when.

Qualcomm ventures has been investing in startups in India since 2007 and some of its portfolio companies include online real estate portal Housing, Reverie Language Technologies(which operates the multilingual Android keyboard Swalekh), traffic information provider Traffline, mobile application development and distribution company AppsDaily, medical services company Portea Medical and mapping services company MapMyIndia. So far, Qualcomm ventures has invested in 12 companies in India. Here’s a full list of their portfolio companies.

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Health services: In 2013, Spice Global partnered with Qualcomm to launch health services on mobile in India.  Qualcomm Life Inc, a subsidiary of Qualcomm was set up in 2011 to enable the wireless mHealth community including patients, doctors, healthcare experts, even developers and the technologists through its 2net platform. This platform is designed to access and store data from patients’ medical device which can later be retrieved and accessed through a cellular connection.

Qualcomm Services Labs: In 2010, the company launched Qualcomm Services Labs, a fully owned subsidiary set up to incubate new ideas, technologies and service models that would drive the adoption of Qualcomm’s technologies.  Qualcomm had said that products incubated at the services lab will either be transferred to a new or existing Qualcomm division, established as a separate business entity.

QPrize competition: In 2009, Qualcomm also launched the QPrize competition in India, a global seed investment competition, as well as an early stage fund, to encourage early stage entrepreneurs. The India winner of the QPrize competition received seed funding of $ 100,000.