Huawei unveiled intentions to invest $100 million in Asia-Pacific start-ups over the next three years, seeking to boost the developer ecosystem in the region through its Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) and cloud offerings.

At its Huawei Cloud Spark Founders Summit, the company stated the move will aim to support 1,000 start-ups in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, as part of its Spark accelerator programme launched in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand in 2020.

The programme was created to provide support platforms for start-ups with the help of local authorities, incubators, venture capitalists and academia.

Huawei also launched an initiative for cloud-plus-cloud collaboration which it expressed confidence will encourage innovation, business ecosystems, and global and local services. It will be boosted by $40 million, coming in equal portions from its Cloud unit and HMS.

It also planned to build an HMS Developer Innovation Centre in cooperation with more than 200 universities in the region, to offer support to 100,000 HMS cloud-native developers.

“In 2021, our plan is to support 200 start-ups in the HMS ecosystem, and share our network of channel resources with developers worldwide who together serve 1 billion Huawei device users”, Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei’s cloud business unit (pictured), commented.

The company said its HMS platform was the third-largest mobile app ecosystem globally, with 4.5 million developers from more than 170 countries currently using it.