Huawei earmarks $100m for investments in Asia-Pacific startups over 3 years

Huawei, at its inaugural Spark Founders Summit, said it would invest US$100 million in startups in the Asia Pacific over the next three years as part of its Spark accelerator program.

The Chinese tech giant added that it will focus on developing startup hubs in four new markets: Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. The Spark program is already up and running in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Photo credit: Tech in Asia

According to Huawei, its program would lend support to tech startups that have been registered for under 10 years and operate in sectors such as financial services and insurance, transportation and logistics, media and entertainment, education, and platform services. The telecom equipment major intends to bring a total of 1,000 startups onboard the accelerator program.

At the summit, Huawei also launched a US$40 million “cloud-plus-cloud collaboration and joint innovation” program, which will support startups with the tech giant’s resources.

The company added it would support 200 startups in the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) ecosystem globally this year. It also plans to launch an HMS developer innovation center to back 100,000 cloud-native developers that are part of the ecosystem.

In addition to this, Huawei also launched three startup-related initiatives: the Spark Developer program, aimed at helping the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region through Huawei Cloud; the Spark Pitstop program that is designed to support startups on Huawei Cloud to boost product development; and the Spark Innovation program that will focus on enterprise solutions through the Spark startup ecosystem.

Through the Spark accelerator program and other new initiatives, Huawei is looking to ramp up support for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises in order to “help them harness the advantages of cloud synergy,” Huawei International CEO Foo Fang Yong said in a statement.