Qualcomm Ventures’ QPrize Contest Pulls in VCs, Especially Overseas

Qualcomm QPrize Qualcomm Ventures

It’s been a few weeks since Qualcomm Ventures kicked off the fourth edition of its international QPrize competition, an initiative that seems to be taking on a life of its own.

The contest began in 2009 as a kind of global hunt for innovation—a way to find the next generation of promising, early stage companies developing new mobile and Web technologies. It is now open to startups in seven regions—North America, Israel, Latin America, South Korea, India, Europe, and China. Each regional winner gets a $100,000 loan (which converts into an equity investment), and a chance to win another $150,000 in a final round of the Q Prize competition.

The contest has the unstated benefit of helping San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) augment its technology ecosystem around the world. Yet the competition also benefits from Qualcomm’s global reach, which includes R&D facilities in Israel, India, and elsewhere. As a result, the QPrize has been drawing other venture investors to join in the effort, especially in key overseas markets.

That means startups competing in regional QPrize competitions are not just getting funding from Qualcomm’s investment arm, according to Nagraj Kashyap, the senior vice president of Qualcomm Ventures.

“Over the last two years, we’ve gotten a lot of interest from Microsoft in India,” Kashyap said in a telephone interview, and three other venture funds in India—Accel Partners, Persistent, and One97—have joined in the regional QPrize contest in this year. In China, Kashyap said Qualcomm Ventures has been working more closely with Sequoia Capital.

“We are playing a more and more

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.