Qualcomm buys Arduino, the Ivrea-based company famous for open source boards

Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chip giant, announces an agreement to acquire Arduino, the company founded in 2005 at the Interaction design institute in Ivrea, Italy, founded by Olivetti and Telecom Italia, to make simple programmable boards with open source technologies and which later became a symbol for rapid prototyping and the 'makers' movement, i.e. digital artisans capable of making connected objects in a simple way, and training for budding developers in schools and universities. Over the last few years, Arduino has undergone a transition towards industrial applications and iOT, i.e. small devices and sensors, which has also been a financial mutation with a funding round of $54 million between 2022 and 2023 with CDP Venture Capital playing a primary role

"The acquisition will allow us to evolve from a technological point of view for our growth project in the more industrial part,' Arduino CEO Fabio Violante told Il Sole 24 Ore. 'It allows us to make a necessary leap in scale as a cloud infrastructure and to strengthen ourselves in Edge Ai,' that is, artificial intelligence executed directly on local devices. Massimo Banzi, the historic co-founder and face of Arduino, adds: 'Arduino has democratised access to technology by creating a community, which is its strength; to make artificial intelligence and carry out the mission, you need someone with broad shoulders. Everything will remain as before: Arduino will maintain its independent brands, tools and mission, but with greater reach and resources thanks to Qualcomm. In addition, Arduino remains committed to opening up and supporting multi-vendor hardware.

Qualcomm will bring advanced computing, graphics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, while Arduino will bring the simplicity of its products, a research team that has been working on them for years, and a community of 33 million active users worldwide. And cwith the acquisition comes the Arduino UNO Q, a single-board computer with 'dual brain' architecture: a microprocessor compatible with Linux Debian and a real-time microcontroller. Based on the Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 chip, it is designed for vision and audio AI solutions applicable to smart home and industrial automation. It is also the first board compatible with the Arduino App Lab, a new environment that unifies development on real-time systems, Linux, Python, and artificial intelligence streams.

Arduino is headquartered in Switzerland, but the vast majority of its employees -in 2023 there were 185 - are in Italy, in Turin, where R&D is concentrated. 'The team will remain in Italy,' Violante is keen to emphasise, 'and indeed the idea is to strengthen it with new investments. Production has always been carried out by external factories near Ivrea, only the new board, the first one made with Qualcomm, is made in Asia.

For Qualcomm, the acquisition is part of a path that extends from smartphones, where it is the leader with its Snapdragon processors, to the iOT. The decision to buy Arduino, in fact, comes after the recent integrations of Edge Impulse and Foundries.io, to provide a complete platform that includes hardware, software and cloud services. With Arduino, it brings in a .