This little-known NVIDIA programme is backing 4,500 European startups

Stijn Verrept knew in 2018 that his company needed to find an unconventional solution if they were going to develop a quality smart lamp to detect the motion of an older person’s fall to notify caregivers. 

Verrept, the founder of Belgian startup Nobi, tried manually calculating the distance a person could fall, mounting cameras to the ceiling or the lamps themselves with no luck. The tech is meant to allow the elderly to stay in their homes.

They decided to pivot to artificial intelligence (AI), with the company choosing NVIDIA microchips for their high processing power and the ability to quickly retrain the lamps. 

By 2020, Nobi and its smart lamps joined NVIDIA’s Inception programme "to help startups evolve faster through cutting-edge technology,” according to the company’s website. 

Nobi redeemed $100,000 (€92,000) worth of NVIDIA credits to store their AI training on the company’s cloud, where it still stays today. 

“It helped a lot because every dollar that you don’t have to spend on cloud cost, you can put into development, and any tech startup is development-heavy,” Verrept told Euronews Next. 

Nobi is one of 4,500 companies in Europe and over 17,000 around the world that are supported by the programme, according to a spokesperson from NVIDIA. 

Through Inception, NVIDIA offers a headstart to select AI startups on the continent with “preferred pricing” on their graphics cards, courses and exclusive events, according to their website. 

It’s one of three investment arms that the world’s second-most profitable company is using to build what they call a global AI ecosystem.

Verrept estimates that the programme gave his company Nobi something of an 18-month head start on building their prototype. 

At Moon Surgical, a