Channel programs News
Dell Technologies Capital's Scott Darling On Running A Different Breed Of Corporate VC Firm
Kyle Alspach
Could you give an example of that in your portfolio?
We invested in this company called Graphcore, which is a machine learning acceleration company. They're building a next-generation processor to run machine learning applications much faster. We concluded the investment about a year ago -- of course machine learning is all the rage now. But if you had said to someone, why would Dell be interested in machine learning -- you're really not an application layer company? Our view was that machine learning is going to become a part of all workloads, and that in fact the hardware underneath it must be capable of running those workloads. So we thought it made sense. Another possible example is Edico Genome, which does acceleration of genomic capability. It's very much the same kind of thing -- you'd say, wow, Dell Technologies is not a health care science company, why are they investing in genomic acceleration? We think that just like many decades ago, when people in the IT industry figured out that financial services is a huge consumer of IT technology, we believe that genomic analysis is also going to become something that pervades the entire healthcare industry. And therefore we should have capabilities we can provide to our customers in those areas.