Qualcomm Completes First Year of Africa Innovation Platform

Emma Okonji

Qualcomm Incorporated has announced the completion of the first year of the Africa Innovation Platform, a suite of mentorship, education, and training programmes created to support the development of Africa’s emerging technology ecosystem.

The platform has provided resources and support for local universities, ten small-to-medium sized startups, and grant participants. The programme exposed these groups to Qualcomm Technologies Inc.’s engineers and its state-of-the-art capabilities suite for mobile platforms and technologies, including 4G, 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Qualcomm also announced several additional benefits to the Innovation Platform for this year’s participants which include: Social Impact Funds from the Qualcomm Wireless Reach Initiative to help QMIA startups scale; and Patent filing incentive fund, to help QMIA startups protect their inventions through patenting; QMIA 2024 programme launch for mentoring 10 deep-tech startups in Africa.

President, QTL and Global Affairs, Qualcomm Incorporated, Alex Rogers, said: “With emerging technologies in 5G, AI, robotics, IoT, and multimedia, we are seeing a new era of invention. Through initiatives like the Qualcomm Innovation Platform, we are enabling companies around the world to build on our foundational technologies and join us in finding solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.”

According to Rogers, in 2023, Qualcomm’s Africa Innovation Platform reached certain milestones such as Qualcomm Make in Africa Startup Mentorship Programme, which is the first initiative of its kind in Africa, and it is an equity-free mentorship programme that identified promising early-stage startups keen on applying advanced connectivity and processing technologies to innovative end-to-end systems solutions, including hardware, and provided these companies with business coaching, access to engineering consultation for product development, and guidance on protecting intellectual property.