Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), the venture capital arm of Samsung recognised the potential of Indian startups and has decided to invest a whopping amount of $8.5 million (60 crores) across four startups.
“SVIC is planning to make 100 investments (each amounting $1 million to $5 million) in India in the next three to five years,” Aloknath De, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru shared in an interview.
The four start-ups in which SVIC has invested so far in the country are system apps company OSLabs (Indus OS), speech technology startup Gnani.ai, IoT solutions provider Silvan Innovation Labs and an early stage computer vision start-up the name of which has not been disclosed.
While Bangalore-based Gnani.ai works in the space of automatic speech recognition and natural language processing in Indic languages for building voice assistants and for speech analytics on the other hand, Silvan Innovation Labs is a leader in Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for homes and enterprises and has pioneered solutions for smart spaces which provides solutions that address safety, security, comfort, convenience and energy management.
“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.” De said
“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,” he added.
As for Mumbai-based OSLabs which has developed a curated app store, Indus App Bazaar, that has a collection of over 400,000 mobile apps in multiple Indian languages was used by Samsung to launch the new Galaxy Store.
“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,” said Rakesh Deshmukh, Co-founder and CEO, OSLabs.
Similarly, Samsung’s investment in Gnani’s ASR engine has the potential to power Samsung’s Bixby vernacular service in the future.
With an installed base of over 6,000 homes and 12 live communities, Silvan’s products and IoT platform is expected to add value to Samsung’s efforts to have all its products IoT ready by 2020.
