Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), the venture capital arm of Samsung, in July announced its maiden investments in India, totaling $8.5 million (nearly Rs 60 crore) across four Indian start-ups. “SVIC is planning to make 100 investments (each amounting $1 million to $5 million) in India in the next three to five years,” Mr Aloknath De, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru, told IANS in a telephonic conversation.

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. Mumbai-based 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 rising need for automated speech recognition (ASR) in the vernacular languages space.

On the other hand, Bengaluru-based Silvan Innovation Labs is a leader in Internet of Things (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 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.