Qualcomm Ventures Forms Joint Investment Business with Novartis

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the San Diego wireless technologies giant, plans to form a joint investment business through its corporate ventures arm with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis. The joint investment entity would make as much as $100 million available for innovative health startups.

In a statement, the partners say they would invest in early stage companies that “offer technologies, products or services that ‘go beyond the pill’ to benefit physicians and patients.”

Just last week, Qualcomm Ventures was ranked as the most active strategic investor in digital health & health IT in 2014, according to annual reports from both Rock Health and StartUp Health.

According to Qualcomm Ventures’ senior vice president, Nagraj Kashyap, “Qualcomm has been actively investing in digital health since 2011, and we currently have 18 healthcare startups in our global portfolio. This joint investment company with Novartis will allow us to combine their expertise in healthcare solutions with our knowledge of mobile technologies to accelerate innovation in the field of digital medicine.”

Qualcomm established its $100 million Qualcomm Life Fund at the end of 2011, at the same time the company formed Qualcomm Life as a subsidiary to operate its wireless health business. Investments by the fund, managed by Qualcomm Ventures, include Noom, Fitbit, goBalto, Sotera Wireless, AliveCor, Cambridge Temperature Concepts, and AirStrip.

Qualcomm said last week it’s also working more closely with Novartis on clinical trials, by using its 2net wireless technology as a platform for collecting and aggregating patient data from clinical trials. I’m arranging a follow-up conversation with Qualcomm senior vice president Rick Valencia, who oversees Qualcomm Life, to glean more details about these partnerships, and what Qualcomm Life and Novartis hope to accomplish.

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.