Qualcomm, Accel invest in Indo-China venture Borqs

BENGALURU:

Borqs

, an India-China venture that helped build Reliance Jio’s

Android

phones, has raised funding from

Qualcomm

Ventures and Accel Partners India that values the company at $303 million.

The funding amount was not disclosed. The company, founded in March 2007 by former Motorola employees Pat Chan, Bob Li and Hareesh Ramanna, and which has its primary R&D centre in Bengaluru, has previously been funded by Intel Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Keytone Ventures and others.

Borqs has also announced a reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed investment firm Pacific Special Acquisition Corp (PSAC), which is expected to be completed by end of April. The merged entity will operate as Borqs.

Karthee Madasamy, vice president and MD of Qualcomm Ventures India, said the company’s investments in India are to help fuel innovations by startups such as Borqs that are contributing to the mobile and IoT (internet of things) ecosystem.

“This investment will fund additional engineering capabilities to invigorate advances in the development of autonomous products and a connected society.

This will help in creation of innovative 4G phone design expertise in India with local and global OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) in support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of design in India,” he said.

Shekhar Kirani of Accel partners said that Borqs has agreat set of customers, delivers end-to-end IoT solutions/platform and has strong partnerships with leading chip companies.

Borqs works with internet-connected device manufacturers to design chips as well as devices, and associated software.

Its customers include Qualcomm, Intel, Motorola, Reliance, AT&T and Sprint. For Reliance Jio, it launched what is called the FDD/TDD (frequency division duplex / time division duplex) combined carrier aggregation high-speed 4G Android phone.

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