Intel Capital Invests $132 Million in 11 Disruptive Technology Startups

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment organization, announced today new investments totaling $132 million in 11 technology startups. These companies bring to market breakthrough innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous computing and chip design. The companies joining Intel Capital’s portfolio are Anodot, Astera Labs, Axonne, Hypersonix, KFBIO, Lilt, MemVerge, ProPlus Electronics, Retrace, Spectrum Materials and Xsight Labs.

“Intel Capital identifies and invests in disruptive startups that are working to improve the way we work and live. Each of our recent investments is pushing the boundaries in areas such as AI, data analytics, autonomous systems and semiconductor innovation. Intel Capital is excited to work with these companies as we jointly navigate the current world challenges and as we together drive sustainable, long-term growth.” –Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital

Intel Capital’s New Investments:

• Anodot (Redwood City, Calif.) uses machine learning to drive the future of analytics — autonomous business monitoring. Fortune 500 companies across telco, finance and digital sectors rely on Anodot’s real-time, contextual alerts to catch the incidents that impact revenue and costs. Examples include drops in success rate, customer incidents, app performance and other business metrics. By helping business users find and fix incidents quickly, Anodot helps customers cut incident management by as much as 80%.
• Astera Labs (Santa Clara, Calif.) is a fabless semiconductor company that develops purpose-built connectivity solutions for data-centric systems to remove performance bottlenecks in compute-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company’s product portfolio includes system-aware semiconductor integrated circuits, boards and services to enable robust connectivity for PCI Express® (PCIe®) and Compute Express Link™ (CXL) solutions.
• Axonne (Sunnyvale, Calif.) develops next-generation high-speed Ethernet network connectivity solutions for automobiles. Axonne’s solutions integrate systems in the connected car, such as autonomous driving sensors and displays with compute clusters. The company’s proprietary mixed signal circuits, algorithms and digital signal processing help with demanding applications, such as autonomous driving and infotainment, that require a high degree of functional safety, reliability, security and electric vehicle-friendly power efficiency. These solutions also help to ease the transition of in-vehicle legacy electrical/electronic architectures to scalable and adaptable service-based zones and beyond.
• Hypersonix (San Jose, Calif.) is an AI-powered autonomous analytics platform designed for consumer industries such as retail, restaurants, hospitality and ecommerce. Decision-makers need real-time actionable insights from disparate data sources, such as regional business performance or web traffic. Hypersonix’s platform empowers customers to make faster and smarter decisions that drive profitability, productivity and customer engagement through simple voice and text search, data visualization and interpretation.
• KFBIO (Zhejiang, China) is a biotech company that builds digital pathology systems. Its pathology scanner improves on traditional microscopes with digital capabilities and connectivity. KFBIO’s medical image processing uses big data, cloud computing and AI to quickly and reliably scan and digitize images, making them easier to share for remote consultation with experts, and improve speed and accuracy of AI-aided pathologist diagnoses.
• Lilt (San Francisco) aims to make the world’s information accessible to all with AI-powered language translation software and services. Traditional translation services can be time-consuming and costly – impeding companies from translating all the information that could be useful. Lilt’s software provides accurate, localized and cost-effective translation. Combining adaptive neural machine translation technology, a translation management system and professional translators, Lilt enables organizations to use language translation to scale their localization programs, accelerate go-to-market strategies and improve the global customer experience.
• MemVerge (Milpitas, Calif.) is a software company founded on the vision that every application should run in memory. MemVerge’s Memory Machine™ software is the foundation for a new era of Big Memory computing, providing petabyte-size pools of shared persistent memory and powerful data services so that data-centric applications such as AI, machine learning, financial market data analytics and high-performance computing are easier to develop and deploy. MemVerge’s Big Memory software lowers the cost of memory, allows it to scale out and makes it highly available with memory data services such as ZeroIO™ snapshot, memory replication, and lightning-fast recovery.
• ProPlus Electronics (Shandong, China) is an electronic design automation (“EDA”) company, specializing in advanced device modeling and fast circuit simulation solutions. ProPlus helps to close the divide between design and manufacturing with software that makes chip design faster and fabrication yields higher, allowing the semiconductor industry to create more powerful and diverse products.
• Retrace (San Francisco) believes that smarter, more innovative use of dental data is essential for reducing the oral disease burden. Retrace applies artificial intelligence and other advanced technology in its predictive analytics platform that uses real-time data to improve dental decision-making. Retrace empowers health plans, providers, and patients to create a more cost-effective, evidence-based oral healthcare experience.
• Spectrum Materials (Fujian, China) is a high-purity specialty gas and material supplier for semiconductor fabs. It has one of the largest germane production bases in Quanzhou, Fujian. Led by veteran industry experts, Spectrum Materials is dedicated to providing critical specialty gas and material solutions for advanced process node applications of multiple leading fabs around the world.
• Xsight Labs (Kiryat Gat, Israel) develops innovative technology for accelerating next generation, cloud-based, data-intensive workloads such as machine learning, data analytics and disaggregated storage. In this data-centric era with exponential bandwidth growth, Xsight provides new chipset designs that enhance scalability, performance and efficiency.

Why It Is Important: Intel Capital continues to accelerate and develop technology and innovation that will enrich lives and how people work:

• Intel Capital is on track to invest between $300 million and $500 million in technology companies in 2020, spanning technology domains in artificial intelligence, intelligent edge and network transformation. These technologies will bring broad transformations to industries such as healthcare, automotive and consumer goods. Intel Capital continues to partner with and add value to companies of all stages that make a difference.1
• Intel Capital believes a diverse workforce enhances innovation, and its investments reflect this. In 2019, Intel Capital made 32 percent of its new investments in startups led by women, underrepresented minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, entrepreneurs living with disabilities and/or veterans, up from 18 percent in 2018. In 2015, Intel Capital announced its goal to invest $125 million over five years in companies with diverse leadership. That goal was achieved two years early in 2018; as of the first quarter of 2020, Intel Capital reached a new milestone, surpassing $300 million invested since publicly announcing its initiative.
• Intel Capital is committed to bringing resources and expertise to accelerate the work of these teams and the realization of potentially world-changing technologies. In 2019, Intel Capital invested $466 million in 36 new investments and 35 follow-on investments, led 72% of its deals and had 22 successful exits. It delivered active support to advise entrepreneurs to build successful and scalable businesses through mentorship, collaborative innovation, go-to-market strategies, company board membership and facilitation of more than 3,000 portfolio introductions to Global 2000 decision-makers.