The chip giant has been busy shopping even as the world scrambles to deal with the global COVID-19 pandemic. Through its venture arm, Intel Capital, Intel has announced its aim of investing between $300 to $500 million in disruptive tech companies in 2020 with a special focus on AI, edge computing, analytics and networking. During an earnings call late last year, CEO Bob Swan said the company generated $3.8 billion in AI-based revenue in 2019, and that he anticipates the market opportunity will reach $25 billion by 2024.

In this round of investment, Intel added international start-ups such as Anodot, Astera Labs, Hypersonix, KFBIO, MemVerge, Lilt, Retrace, Axonne, ProPlus Electronics, Spectrum Materials and Xsight Labs. Let’s take a brief look at these companies and their works:

Anodot, a customer analytics company

The Santa-Clara based Anodot uses machine learning to perform autonomous business monitoring, aka incident management for clients across telco, finance, and digital sectors. The start-up’s platform for real-time, contextual alerts helps to spot incidents — e.g., drops in success rate, customer incidents, app performance, and business metrics — that might impact revenue and costs.

Astera Labs, Fabless Semiconductor

This Santa Clara-based start-up develops purpose-built connectivity solutions for data-centric systems. It aims to remove performance bottlenecks in compute-intensive workloads like AI and machine learning, with products that span system-aware semiconductor integrated circuits, boards and services, and more.

Axonne, connectivity solutions for automobiles

The Sunnyvale-based company develops next-generation high-speed network connectivity solutions for autonomous driving that require a high degree of functional reliability and electric vehicle-friendly power efficiency.

Hypersonix, a consumer analytics platform

The San Jose- based Hypersonix excels at consumer industries like retail, restaurants, hospitality, and e-commerce. What sets it apart from Anodot is that it is a voice and text search supported and data visualisation system which provides real-time actionable insights from disparate data sources like regional business performance and website traffic.

KFBIO, modern healthcare systems

This Ningbo-based company uses big data, cloud computing and AI to create pathology systems that help medical image processing tech scans and digitises images to make them easier to share for remote consultations with experts.

Lilt, smart language translation systems

The San Francisco-based company uses machine learning, a translation management system, and professional translators to enable organisations to scale their localisation programs and improve their customers’ experiences.

MemVerge, memory machine software

The California-based pioneer has introduced Big Memory Computing, providing petabyte-size pools of shared persistent memory and powerful data services for AI, machine learning, financial analytics, etc.

ProPlus Electronics, circuit stimulation solutions

This Chinese electronic design automation company specialising in device modelling and fast circuit simulation solutions.

Retrace, a modern dental healthcare system

The San Francisco-based predictive dental decision-making platform aims to reduce the oral disease burden for health plans, providers, and patients by creating a more cost-effective and evidence-based oral healthcare experience.

Spectrum Materials, specialised gas supplier

This Chinese start-up supplies a high-purity speciality gas and material for semiconductor industries.

Xsight Labs, chipset designer

The Israeli company develops technology for accelerating next-gen, cloud-based, data-intensive workloads such as machine learning by offering new chipset designs that enhance scalability, performance and efficiency.

Since its launch in 1991, Intel Capital has made a total of 1600+ investment in almost 400 start-ups. Recently, Intel Capital had acquired Habana Labs, an Israeli developer of programmable AI and machine learning accelerators for cloud data centres, as well as Moovit, a mobility start-up that could be central to Intel subsidiary Mobileye’s plans for a robot-taxi service.