Intel Corp has revealed the first five recipients of equity investments made by the $250m Intel 64 Fund it set up last month (CI No 3,658). The five, which each receive an unspecified amount of money from the fund, are Extricity Software Inc, Monterey Design Systems Inc, SpeechWorks International Inc, TimesTen Performance Software Inc and WebLine Communications Inc. Intel also announced that The Boeing Co and Enron International have joined the group of corporate users participating in the fund.
Four of the five are working on versions of their server applications that will be optimized for the IA-64: Extricity on packaged business-to-business integration applications; SpeechWorks on phone-based speech applications for e-commerce transactions; TimesTen on its in-memory database technology; and WebLine on visual collaboration software for e-commerce and e-services. Monterey will provide integrated physical design systems for the electronic design automation workstation market.
Meanwhile, Intel president and CEO Craig Barrett told investors at the Dow Jones CEO Summit on Converging Technologies in London yesterday that his company was seeking to boost its investments in non-US companies. “From an investment standpoint, we are a reasonably large venture-capital investor around the world he said. Historically most of our investments have been in the US, but we are attempting to internationalize that at a rapid rate. I’d expect by the end of next year we’ll continue to expand our venture-capital investments and half of them will be outside the US. Barratt said the three hot investment areas are Western Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Last year, Intel made about 130 non-strategic and relatively small venture capital investments around the world, making a total of arounf $350m. I expect we will do more than that this year said Barratt. Intel said it would also continue to buy companies and make strategic investments, as it did last year with Micron Technology Inc and the Samsung Group. Our intent is to continue that investment said Barratt.
