Samsung Ventures makes first India investments

The investments include smart phone operating system provider Indus OS, speech analytics developer Gnani, internet-of-things (IoT) technology business Silvan Innovation Labs, and a fourth unidentified start-up in the field of computer vision. 

“The Indian start-up 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,” Aloknath De, chief technology officer at Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru, said in a statement.

Indus OS has developed a curated app store, Indus App Bazaar, which has a collection of over 400,000 mobile apps in multiple Indian languages, while Silvan focuses on IoT for home and enterprise applications. Gnani specializes in person-to-machine interactions, including automatic speech recognition and natural language processing in Indic languages.

Samsung plans to partner with Indus App Bazaar when it launches its new Galaxy Store for smart phone apps, which will be available in 12 Indic languages. Meanwhile, the investment in Gnani is expected to support Samsung’s Bixby vernacular service, and Silvan is expected to help the Korean electronics giant transition its entire products catalogue to IoT-readiness by 2020.

Samsung claims to have invested more than $15 billion in R&D through its 36 R&D centers globally in 2018 alone. The firm recently committed about $22 billion to its innovation agenda, which includes an expansion of the venture incubation program. In 2017, it launched a $150 million global VC fund via its acceleration unit Samsung Next.

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• Topics
• South Asia
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• India
• Samsung
• artificial intelligence
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