Intel Capital, the investment arm of the giant chip maker, announced Thursday that it has invested $60 million in 15 data-focused startups as part of its plan to support early-stage innovation in the rapidly growing sector.

The 15 companies cross borders, located in the United States, Canada, China, Israel and Japan. They also include substantial coverage of companies led by women and underrepresented minorities as part of Intel’s ongoing investment in encouraging diversity. Notably, the new investments bring Intel Capital’s year-to-date investment total to $566 million.

“The world is undergoing a data explosion,” Intel Capital President Wendell Brooks said in a statement. “By 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4 TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people.”

Explaining Intel Capital’s interest in data startups, Brooks added that it was “actively investing in startups across the technology spectrum that can help expand the data ecosystem and pathfind important new technologies.”

The new investments range across a number of data startup types, covering artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, analytics and more.

In analytics, Intel Capital invested in Amenity Analytics, a startup that has built a text analytics platform that allows customers to identify actionable signals from unstructured data; Bigstream, the creator of hyperacceleration technology that delivers orders of magnitude performance gains for Apache Spark using hardware and software accelerators; LeapMind a company developing a platform for the “Deep Learning of Things;” and Synthego, a provider of genome engineering solutions.

Under the heading of startups that are focused on “capturing data,” Intel Capital’s investments include AdHawk Microsystems, a startup developing a camera-free eye tracking system for use in augmented and virtual reality systems; Trace, a “sports artificial intelligence company” that is using deep learning for the delivery of performance insights; Bossa Nova Robotics, who is developing autonomous service robots for the global retail industry; and EchoPixel, a medical visualization software maker that has developed a 3D system for medical professionals.

In the area of managing data, investments include Horizon Robotics, a Chinese company that provides embedded artificial intelligence solutions; Reniac, which offers a platform that solves data bottlenecks in public cloud, hybrid and on-premise data centers without software changes to existing applications; and TileDB Inc., the startup behind the eponymous project created at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data, which is described as a “novel system for managing massive, multidimensional array data that frequently arise from scientific applications.”

In the final category of “securing data,” Alcide, a network security platform for any combination of container, VM and bare metal data centers operated by multiple orchestration systems, leads the list, followed by Eclypsium, a cybersecurity technology platform maker that assists organizations in defending their systems against firmware, hardware and supply chain attacks; Intezer, an interesting Israeli startup that applies biological immune system concepts to cybersecurity; and Synack, maker of a scalable, continuous, hacker-powered testing platform that uncovers security vulnerabilities that often remain undetected by traditional penetration testers and scanners.

Image: Intel Capital