Samsung Venture Unit Backs Four Indian Startups With $8.5 Million Investment

Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), which is Samsung's investment arm that actively invests in future-oriented businesses across the globa has announced its maiden investments in India, totalling USD 8.5 million across four Indian startups.

Being a leader in innovation, Samsung closely works with a host of startups committed to building innovative and purposeful technologies across the globe and in India. The company's investment arm has decided to make its investments in a system apps company OSLabs (Indus OS), speech technology startup Gnani.ai, IoT solutions provider Silvan Innovation Labs and an early-stage computer vision startup.

OSLabs has developed a curated app store, Indus App Bazaar, which has a collection of over 400,000 mobile apps in multiple Indian languages. 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. Speech recognition is today an important part of Human to Machine interactions and there is a raising need for automated speech recognition (ASR) in the vernacular languages space.

On the other hand, Silvan Innovation Labs is a leader in IoT solutions for homes and enterprises and has pioneered solutions for smart spaces. The startup provides solutions that address safety, security, comfort, convenience and energy management.

The four investments by SVIC in Indian startups are strategic in nature. Samsung had recently partnered with OS Labs to launch the new Galaxy Store, powered by Indus App Bazaar, which brings app discovery and downloads experience to consumers in 12 local Indian languages in addition to English and offers personalized app recommendations without mandatory sign in.

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 will add value to Samsung's efforts to have all its products IoT ready by 2020.

SVIC is actively investing in future-oriented businesses based on new and innovative technologies that are expected to serve as new growth engines. It was established to promote promising companies engaging in the development of new technologies. As of March 2019, SVIC has over USD 2.2 billion in assets under management.

In 2018, Samsung invested over USD 15 billion on R&D through its 36 R&D centres globally and also announced it will invest USD 22 billion over the next three years in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, automotive electronics components and biopharmaceuticals that will drive its future growth.