South Korean business tycoon, Samsung, with its venture capital arm, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC) has announced $8.5 million investment in four Indian startups.
The four Indian startups
- IndusOS- Mumbai-based system apps company
- Silvan Innovation Labs- Bengaluru-based IoT solutions provider
- Gnani.ai- Bengaluru-based speech technology startup
- An early-stage computer vision startup- name disclosed
The investment in the four startups is chosen strategically. With this, Samsung investment arm SVIC has entered into India to support the future-oriented business curated innovative technologies which are possible of serving the new growth engines.
Samsung venture arm is focusing on investing in early and late-stage startups that have a fit with Samsung Group’s products and goals.
Dr Aloknath De, CTO, Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru, said that,
“The Indian startup ecosystem has matured over the last few years with early-stage companies working on top of the line technology and services, especially in areas like Artificial Intelligence, IoT, cloud and other emerging technology solutions as well as services.
Samsung is committed to work with and invest in promising Indian startups. This will be a win-win for both as it will help startups scale their solutions through this deep engagement while we get an opportunity to enrich our offerings to our consumers.”
The Lucky Four
Indus OS
Samsung has integrated the Indus OS app store- App Bazaar and made available on all Samsung smartphones. The startup has 400K+ regional apps and is available in 12 local languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and other languages apart from English.
Rakesh Deshmukh, Cofounder, OSLabs,
“As we look to offer the Indus experience to wider audiences, these funds will help us reach our goal of empowering 100 million Indian users with a content and commerce platform in the language of their choice, thus ensuring a truly inclusive digital growth and an enriched user experience for everyone.”
Gnani.ai
Gnani.ai, a Bengaluru-based company works on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing for building voice assistants and speech analytics.
The potential investment by Samsung into the startup is by recognizing the power of its ASR engine that can be combined to support Samsung’s Bixby vernacular service.
Ganesh Gopalan, the founder, said in a statement.
“This investment is a reaffirmation of our expertise in speech recognition technologies. We stay committed to our goal to continue being the leading speech recognition engine in Indic languages for the voice assistant, call automation and speech analytics applications for multiple customers.”
Silvan Innovation Labs
Silvan Innovation Labs is an Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that build technology for homes and businesses for smart spaces. Over 6000 homes and around 12 live communities use Silvan’s products.
With the integration of Silvan products and IoT platform Samsung is looking to have IoT products available by 2020.
Avinash K Gautam, CEO in a statement,
“IoT is a big and complex market, and strategic partnerships are needed for companies to leverage each other’s strengths to address market needs. Towards that, we are extremely pleased to partner with Samsung Venture, given their deep understanding and reach of various markets.”
Note: The other startup, which is an early stage computer visioned company details were not disclosed yet.
As per reports, in 2018, Samsung has invested over $15 billion on R&D through its 36 R&D centres globally. It also made a statement on investing $22 billion in the next three years in Artificial Intelligence, Automotive electronics components, 5G, and Biopharmaceuticals.
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