Qualcomm Ventures’ QPrize Competition Draws Broader VC Following

When Qualcomm Ventures unveiled the QPrize competition in 2009, Nagraj Kashyap told me a key factor in the decision to create an incentive prize was the evaporation of venture capital amid the liquidity crisis that followed the financial meltdown of 2008.

Kashyap, who heads Qualcomm Ventures, says the need for startup funding is less acute nowadays in the United States. “But outside of North America, there still is clearly a need for this,” especially in places like China, India, and Brazil. Kashyap says he’s also heartened that the competition has attracted a broad following among venture investors.

Qualcomm, which oversees the international prize competition through its venture arm, recently named an Israeli startup, iOnRoad, as the grand prize winner of the third Qualcomm Ventures QPrize. The startup developed a mobile app that enables a smartphone to serve as a dashboard-mounted “personal driving assistant” that monitors speed and traffic conditions and warns motorists when they are driving unsafely—basically an electronic version of a backseat driver. The app includes telematics and a video recording feature that can be used to capture and replay traffic accidents.

After winning $100,000 in venture financing in a regional competition, iOnRoad won an additional $150,000 as the overall QPrize winner.

“From Qualcomm’s perspective, we want to drive innovation throughout the mobile sector,” Kashyap says. “We want the mobile phone to be the center of your life.”

The first stage of the competition is conducted on a regional basis. The competition winnows the

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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.