Intel Capital invests domestically, striving to expand the boundaries of AI, semiconductor innovation and other fields

It is reported that Intel Capital, a global investment institution under Intel Corporation, announced today that it will invest a total of US$132 million, or approximately RMB 936 million, in 11 technology startups.

Invested companies include Anodot, Astera Labs, Axonne, Hypersonix, KFBIO, Lilt, MemVerge, ProPlus Electronics, Retrace, Spectrum Materials, and Xsight Labs.

Among them, three companies are from China, Jiangfeng Biopharma from Zhejiang, ProPhysics from Shandong, and Bochun Materials from Fujian. Intel said that these companies have brought breakthrough innovations to the market in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving computing, chip design, etc., and each of Intel's recent investment projects is expanding the boundaries of artificial intelligence, data analysis, autonomous systems, semiconductor innovation and other fields. Intel Capital is expected to invest $300-500 million in technology companies in the fields of artificial intelligence, intelligent edge, network transformation and other technologies in 2020.

Intel Capital is one of the three most active venture capital institutions in the world, along with Alphabet (Google) and Salesforce. Founded in 1991, it focuses on overseas investment and has invested more than US$12 billion in more than 1,500 companies to date, of which approximately 700 have been successfully listed or acquired, including the well-known Broadcom, VMware, Citrix, Marvell, and Red Hat.

Detailed introduction of the invested companies:

Anodot (Redwood City, California, USA):

Autonomous Business Monitoring, the future of machine learning-driven analytics. Fortune 500 companies in the telecommunications, financial, and digital sectors rely on Anodot’s real-time, contextualized alerts to identify incidents that impact their revenue and costs, such as declines in success rates, customer incidents, changes in application performance, and other business metrics.

Astera Labs (Santa Clara, California, USA):

A fabless semiconductor company. Astera Labs develops purpose-built connectivity solutions for data-centric systems to eliminate performance bottlenecks in compute-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Axonne (Sunnyvale, California, USA):

Developing next-generation high-speed automotive Ethernet connectivity solutions for cars. Axonne's solutions integrate connected car systems such as autonomous driving sensors and displays with computing clusters. The company's proprietary mixed-signal circuits, algorithms, and digital signal processing help address demanding applications such as autonomous driving and infotainment, which require a high degree of functional safety, reliability, security, and electric vehicle-friendly energy efficiency.

Hypersonix (San Jose, California, USA):

An AI-driven autonomous analytics platform designed for consumer industries such as retail, restaurants, hotels, and e-commerce. Decision makers often need real-time and actionable insights from disparate data sources such as regional business performance or network traffic.

KF Biopharm (KFBIO) (Zhejiang, China):

A biotech company developing digital pathology systems. Its pathology scanners improve upon traditional microscopes with digital capabilities and connectivity.

Lilt (San Francisco, California, USA):

Lilt aims to make the world's information accessible to everyone through AI-based language translation software and services. Traditional translation services are time-consuming and costly, which prevents companies from translating all potentially useful information. Lilt's software provides accurate, localized and cost-effective translation services.

MemVerge (Milpitas, California, USA):

A software company whose vision is to make every application software run in memory. MemVerge's Memory Machine software provides PB-level shared persistent memory pools and powerful data services, making it easier for users to develop and deploy data-centric applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, financial market data analysis, and high-performance computing. It is the cornerstone of the new era of big memory computing.

ProPlus Electronics (Shandong, China):

An electronic design automation (EDA) company specializing in advanced device modeling and fast circuit simulation solutions.

Retrace (San Francisco, California, USA):

The company believes that smarter and more innovative use of dental data is critical to reducing the burden of oral disease. Retrace has introduced artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies into its predictive analytics platform to improve dental decision making using real-time data

Spectrum Materials (Fujian, China):

A supplier of high-purity specialty gases and materials for semiconductor manufacturing plants, it owns one of the largest germane production bases located in Quanzhou, Fujian.

Xsight Labs (Gat, Israel):

Develop innovative technologies to accelerate the next generation of cloud-based, data-intensive workloads such as machine learning, data analytics, and disaggregated storage.