Quinn Li has run Qualcomm Ventures, US-listed chipmaker Qualcomm’s corporate venture capital arm, since 2016. In November 2018, he was promoted to senior VP for the corporate.
Qualcomm Ventures has more than 150 active companies in its portfolio. Since inception 24 years ago, the unit has invested more than $3.5bn and has $2bn assets under management. Key investment themes include AI, auto, enterprise and cloud, mobile, internet-of-things and XR.
Qualcomm Ventures has deepened its focus on generative AI, participating in the series D funding round of Hugging Face, the leading machine learning collaboration platform. The round raised a total of $235m.
Other notable investments include San Francisco-based Anthropic, which raised $750m earlier this year. Founded in 2021, the company develops large language models that compete with OpenAI.
Beyond the AI space, Qualcomm Ventures invested in Verity, an autonomous indoor drone company, which raised an $11m series B funding round. In addition, the team also invested in Spectro Cloud, a leading platform provider of modern Kubernetes management, to accelerate edge and AI innovation at scale.
The team also had an exit with ideaForge, the unmanned aerial vehicle company, which listed on the Indian stock exchanges in July 2023.
For the year ahead, Li says: “We are excited about the unique value we can offer startups, leveraging Qualcomm’s leading position in enabling on-device AI. We will continue to look for innovations in our ecosystem, support our portfolio companies in their growth and enable more collaborations with Qualcomm.”
Li says some of the biggest challenges he has had to overcome involved finding the balance between strategic and financial objectives, while building the right team with diverse experience to expand investments into new areas.
The Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist represents the 100
individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.