Thursday, October 19, 2017

NVIDIA Inception Awards Come to Tel Aviv

NVIDIA’s Inception Award competition for promising AI startups found its perfect home today in a packed auditorium in Tel Aviv, the epicenter of Israel’s startup culture. In a nation with the highest number of startups per capita — some 5,000 fledgling companies in a country of 8.5 million people — six of the best competed head-on at GTC Israel, our inaugural local edition of the GPU Technology Conference, which is on a global swing through six cities this fall. In quarter-hour blocks, their CEOs described their business strategy and fielded questions from five judges with deep startup experience, including execs from three Israeli VC firms specializing in AI. The format, longer than the typical several-minute martial-arts like square-offs that place in other startup competitions.