Semiconductor powerhouse Qualcomm is in advanced negotiations to acquire Israeli startup Cellwize for $300 million, Calcalist has learned.

Qualcomm invested in Cellwize through its investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures, in its last funding round, a $32 million Series B round in November 2020. Qualcomm has acquired several Israeli companies in the past, including paying $300 million for Wilocity in 2014 and $45 million for CSR Israel’s Imaging Unit.

Cellwize has raised $56 million to date. Its investors include Intel Capital, Samsung Next, Verizon Ventures, DTCP, Viola Ventures, Vintage, GreenApple and Sonae IM. The company has customers like Verizon, Telefonica, Nextel, Movistar and Bell. According to the company, it is active in 16 countries with its technology used in three million cell sites and more than 800 million subscribers connected through Cellwize.

Cellwize’s platform, named CHIME, provides cloud-based, AI-driven RAN automation and orchestration that accelerates 5G network deployment. In recent years, telecommunications companies around the world have strived to be the first in full 5G deployments, promising faster speeds and increased bandwidth, better customer experience to support consumers, as well as new advanced low latency/high bandwidth M2M use cases. However, managing and controlling a multi-vendor, multi-technology network is many times more difficult than traditional 2/3/4G networks.

Cellwize has built an AI-powered RAN automation platform that automates the deployment, design, management, and optimization of 5G networks, while seamlessly managing the underlying legacy networks. The company’s technology ingests raw data from RAN and external sources such as crowdsourcing and geolocation, summarizes it, and makes it available to any application and solution via open APIs. This enables a unified application layer across all vendors, which connects network applications and algorithms to any OSS or vendor in a protected and controlled way, enabling mobile network operators to accelerate their 5G business and improve the automation of RAN on the network, while reducing operations. advanced costs and time to market for 5G services.

Cellwize was founded in 2012 by Daniel Dribinski and Sasi Geva, who are no longer with the company. The company employs 80 people in Israel and 160 worldwide. The company’s current CEO is Ofir Zemer, former co-founder of Pontis and managing director of Comverse’s Instant Communication division.

Qualcomm employs 45,000 people worldwide, including hundreds of people in Israel at its R&D centers in Haifa and Hod Hasharon. The company has a market cap of over $150 billion.

Cellwize did not respond to a request for comment on the report.