Quinn Li, senior vice president and global head, Qualcomm Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2025 Powerlist.
Quinn Li has long been at home in some of the world’s largest global technology companies. He began his career on the technical staff at Lucent Technologies, before moving to chipmaker Broadcom and then to IBM, where he worked as a product manager.
Today, he is senior vice president and global head of Qualcomm Ventures, the CVC arm of the US semiconductor and wireless technology company Qualcomm.
He joined Qualcomm in 2005 as a senior manager, a role which led to him becoming a director. In that period, he led investments and served as a board observer in companies that included the lithium iron phosphate battery technology maker A123 Systems, and InvenSense, makers of a motion-tracking system on chip. They both went on to successful exits: despite filing for bankruptcy in 2012, A123 was acquired by China’s Wanxiang Group later that year, while InvenSense was bought by Japan’s TDK in 2016.
Quinn Li has long been at home in some of the world’s largest global technology companies.
Two senior positions followed. The first was managing director of North America, where he oversaw investments in the region. The second was as global head of Qualcomm Ventures, before he assumed his current role as senior vice president.
As head of the unit, Li oversees Qualcomm Ventures’ portfolio, which includes $2bn in assets under management across 360 companies globally.
The CVC unit was launched in 2000. It invests in early to growth-stage companies in sectors relevant to its core business. These include AI, automotive tech, such as intelligent transportation systems, cloud computing, and mobile and smart systems.
In February, the unit took part in the $60m series B2 round for ANYbotics, a company making robots for industrial uses. ANYbotics’ flagship product is ANYmal, a crawling, four-legged robot. Qualcomm Ventures hosts a robotics platform for powering autonomous machines, which it says empowers the products of startups such as ANYbotics.
Qualcomm Ventures is also a backer of some of the leading generative AI companies. It participated in the funding round for Hugging Face, a machine learning collaboration platform, and Anthropic, an AI model builder.
The Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.
