Qualcomm has acquired the generative AI division of VinAI, an AI research company headquartered in Hanoi, for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced on Monday.
The move marks Qualcomm’s continued expansion into the AI tooling sector. VinAI, which was founded by former DeepMind research scientist Hung Bui, develops a range of generative AI technologies, including computer vision algorithms and language models.
“This acquisition underscores our commitment to dedicating the necessary resources to R&D that makes us the driving force behind the next wave of AI innovation,” Qualcomm SVP of Engineering Jilei Hou said in a press release. “By bringing in high-caliber talent from VinAI, we are strengthening our ability to deliver cutting-edge AI solutions that will benefit a wide range of industries and consumers.”
VinAI, which Bui started in 2019, primarily focuses on AI-powered automotive products, but also conducts higher-level AI research. Backed by VinGroup, a Vietnamese conglomerate, the company creates solutions like in-cabin monitoring, security, and “smart parking” systems for carmakers and customers in other verticals.
In a 2023 interview with Forbes, Bui said that VinAI had around 200 employees spread across the startup’s offices in Hanoi, the U.S., and Australia.
Bui said that he expects VinAI will contribute to a number of Qualcomm’s product families, including its software and chips for smartphones, PCs, and vehicles. “Our team’s expertise in generative AI and machine learning will help accelerate the development of innovative solutions that can transform the way we live and work,” he added in a statement.
Bui, who serves as VinAI’s CEO, will join Qualcomm following the close of the acquisition, according to the aforementioned press release.
The VinAI acquisition is Qualcomm’s second this year following its purchase of Edge Impulse, a German AI and Internet of Things company, in early March. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon recently called edge AI — AI that can run on devices without the need for data center infrastructure — a “tailwind” for the tech giant.
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Intel’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan wasted no time laying out his plans for the semiconductor giant.
Speaking at the Intel Vision conference this week, Tan told attendees that the company will spin off assets that aren’t core to its mission, Bloomberg reported. Tan didn’t specify what was classified as core and non-core to the company’s business.
Intel will also launch new products including custom semiconductors for customers, Tan added. But he made no mention of breaking up the company, according to Bloomberg, which was a potential turnaround strategy floated in recent months.
Tan was named Intel’s CEO on March 12 and assumed the role on March 18, a little over three months after former CEO Pat Gelsinger was forced out of the role on December 1. Previously, Tan was a member of the company’s board of directors before resigning late last August.
TechCrunch has reached out to Intel for comment.
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Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Now, Temporal has raised a growth round of $146 million to build what it believes the next chapter will be in its space: AI, and specifically building microservices to support newer areas like agentic AI.
A chunk of the investment will be going into R&D. At the end of 2024, the company launched a new feature called Nexus in its Temporal Cloud platform to improve security, fault isolation and modularity, and it says it’s going to continue developing that, alongside public cloud availability for Azure, enabling more cross-cloud work, and “R&D for AI use cases.” Temporal will also be using some of the funds to invest in sales and marketing.
Tiger Global is leading the round, with participation from previous backers that include Index Ventures (who led the Series B) and Sequoia Capital (who led the Series A ). With this Series C, Temporal has now raised $350 million.
The round is sizeable, but the devil is in the details. TechCrunch understands that the company’s valuation with this round is $1.72 billion post-money — “a little bit up — a very little bit,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas said.
The company’s previous funding — a $75 million Series B extension announced February 2023 — was made at a flat valuation of $1.5 billion. And ahead of that, there was a report in Prime Unicorn Index that the valuation had dipped as low as $880 million, a figure the company has not confirmed.
Abbas and his co-founder Maxim Fateev (CTO) started Temporal after the pair worked together at Uber, where they jointly developed Cadence, Uber’s open source orchestration engine designed to route requests and mediate interactions between different microservices.
Knowing that the need for better microservices management extended to many organizations, the pair saw an opportunity to strike out on their own, and Temporal was born.
Temporal’s microservices orchestration platform predates the hype around AI. Customers have been using it since 2019 to help manage functions and actions that bring together data from numerous, disparate apps — payment processing, customer onboarding, order management, ID verification, and infrastructure management among them.
More recently, though, services built on AI, and specifically to fill out the promise of agentic AI — which bring together language models to work with and across data from a number of other services in AI ‘agents’ tailored for specific use cases — have emerged as a prime use case for microservices.
The company’s current client list speaks not only to which companies are using Temporal’s platform to manage any microservice, legacy or otherwise, but also which ones are already using it for AI specifically. The list includes Box, Instacart, Snap and Stripe, as well as Nvidia.
Nvidia is a notable name in that big-name list. A year ago, the GPU giant announced a microservices software platform called NIM to streamline the deployment of AI models (both custom and pre-trained) in production environments. One of the latest developments in that microservices platform has included helping its customers develop AI agents to address trust and safety.
Temporal is still growing, albeit not at the pace it used to in the past. The company told TechCrunch that revenues are up 4.4x in the past 18 months; that’s compared to more than 20x growth the company claimed in the 12 months to Feburary 2023. Meanwhile, the company says that its Temporal.io open source platform now has 183,000 active users; and its enterprise managed service Temporal Cloud now claims 2,500 customers.
There’s no debate that “durable execution,” the category that Abbas and Fateev pioneered, is less buzzy than Ghibli-style AI image generators. But the need to execute long workflows reliably is real, and other teams have entered the field since then, such as workflows-as-code startup Restate and Orkes.
Abbas has been Temporal’s CEO since he and Fateev swapped their roles in April of last year. With “zero reports,” Fateev is now in charge of technology and setting the long term vision. “I am the one who is figuring out what steps we need to take to deliver on that mission,” Abbas said.
These steps include growing headcount from some 250 employees to over 300 in the coming months, as well as “doing a big push in EMEA and [Asia-Pacific & Japan],” he said.
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