Microsoft for Startups and Nvidia’s Inception program for AI startups are coming together to better serve scaling businesses that use AI or machine learning. Starting today, eligible Nvidia Inception startups can get up to $120,000 in Azure cloud credits and sell their products alongside Microsoft’s sales team and its partners.
Concurrently, any Microsoft for Startups company is eligible to receive GPU usage guidance, free access to Deep Learning Institute courses and the DevTalk community forum, and discount rates on hardware like Titan GPU accelerators or DGX systems.
Microsoft for Startups has hundreds of partnerships with startup-enabling organizations, but this the first of its kind with a technology provider focused specifically on AI, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
The Nvidia AI Inception program is one of the most extensive in the world. Since launch in 2016, the service has been utilized by more than 5,000 companies worldwide.
The Microsoft for Startups program was created in 2018 with a $500 million startup funding commitment. The program is now active in 59 countries around the world and is committed to supplying startups with $1 billion in financial support by the end of 2020.
The news was shared today at the Slush tech conference in Helsinki, Finland. A McKinsey Global Institute analysis earlier this year found that Finland is one of the nations most prepared to excel in the age of AI.
Like FbStart or Google’s Launchpad accelerator, the Microsoft for Startups program gives fledgling companies access to mentorship and advisors as well as cloud storage and compute. Unlike others, Microsoft for Startups can offer to co-sell or do joint sales with startup partners.
In other news about ways developers find support, last week at the GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco, GitHub introduced Sponsors for teams, a way for people to provide ongoing financial support to contributors to open source projects.
This is the latest example of Nvidia and Microsoft teaming up in recent weeks. On Monday, Microsoft launched Azure cloud instances for supercomputing powered by Nvidia’s Tesla V100 GPU. Last month in anticipation of the growth of 5G, the two paired up to grow cloud computing for edge devices to share data.
Author: Khari Johnson
Source: Venturebeat
