Intel Capital Bets on Future of Cloud, Gaming

Intel Capital has long been a model of a company using its capital clout to feed its future. Thursday, the investment arm of the world’s largest chipmaker gave an indication of where it thinks the future of startups lies, announcing $24 million in funding for seven companies.

"The best computing experiences unite leading-edge hardware with amazing software," Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president, said in a release. "These investments in best-of-breed software vendors play an integral part in Intel's software strategy by fueling the creation of compelling and unique user experiences across devices.”

And Intel is betting on startups involved in cloud computing, energy management, and online games.

The Intel Capital investments are no guarantee of success for the companies. But as Timothy Prickett Morgan points out in The Register:

Intel Capital, which has been around since 1991, has backed some pretty good horses, including Linux distributors Red Hat and SUSE, middleware maker JBoss (now part of Red Hat), database maker MySQL (part of Oracle these days), and Zend Technologies (amazingly, still not eaten).

Intel has invested over $10bn in 1,140 companies in those twenty years, with 191 of the companies going public and another 268 being acquired.

Intel is putting money into the following companies:

• Dynamic Ops, a Burlington, Massachusetts, maker of virtualization software for use in corporate cloud computing.
• EnLightened, of Sunnyvale, California, a maker of energy management software.
• HP Commerce of Denver, which provides software as a service to manage payments, security and underwriting risks.
• Guavus, a software maker based in Santa Clara, California, whose product allows corporations to sift through massive amounts of data to make decisions.
• Swrve New Media of San Francisco, which provides testing for social media games.
• Gaikai, a Los Angeles company that streams 3-D video games to web browsers.
• Revolution Analytics of Palo Alto, California, a provider of open-source software for statistical computing.

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