Pixeon, a Brazil-based medical imaging software company, raised an undisclosed amount on 19 December from Intel Capital, the corporate venturing unit of US-listed chip maker Intel.
Although Intel Capital has invested in the continent for 11 years, the deal is the corporate venturing unit’s first Latin American healthcare information technology (IT) investment. It comes four months after David Thomas, managing director of Intel Capital Latin America, returned to the continent after a role as director general of merger and acquisitions for the chip maker.
Thomas said: "Pixeon’s technology provides the over 7,500 hospitals and 7,000 diagnostic clinics in Brazil the ability to adopt innovative digital imaging solutions.
"The adoption of advanced image processing technologies will help the healthcare industry to invest more in IT infrastructure, thereby speeding up internal processes and ensuring better quality in healthcare service and diagnostics."
The Pixeon deal, however, was struck by one of Thomas’s Sao Paulo, Brazil-based team, investment manager Alexandre Villela. The other two team members in the city are Ricardo Arantes and Fabio dePaula.
Pixeon’s other large shareholders include company directors Fernando Peixoto and Iomani Engelmann.
Separately, on 15 November, Intel Capital invested an undisclosed amount in Japan-based games group G-Cluster Global. G-Cluster uses the Intel Xeon processor-based servers and will now work on content delivery service in new areas such as healthcare, medical and education sectors.
G-Cluster was founded in 2000 in Finland but after an acquisition and subsequent separation from Broadmedia has been based in Japan. G-Cluster has launched a cloud video-on-demand service for connected televisions in Japan and its cloud gaming service is commercially live with SFR, an operator in France.
Sudheer Kuppam, managing director for Asia Pacific at Intel Capital, said: "As cloud-based services get widely adopted, there is a dramatic spike in the data centre processing loads."