NVIDIA : Five Hot AI Startups Step into Spotlight at GTC Europe Inception Awards

They're the elite. The best of the best. We'll make them better.

We brought five of the hottest startups in Europe and put them in front of a panel of some of tech's savviest players at GTC Europe in Munich Tuesday.

Then we gave one of them - Gamaya, a 20-person startup harnessing deep learning to help farms improve their productivity and sustainability - a new DGX Station in front of a room packed with more than 160 investors, entrepreneurs and industry observers.

'The reason why Inception came along is because we realized how important this new computing approach was going to be, allowing us to solve problems that were previously unsolvable,' said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who watched all five companies give their presentations. 'It stands to reason, therefore, that there would be innovative startups that would apply this technology to do groundbreaking work, and we wanted to be there to support them.'

The award added a dramatic flourish to the story the company told about autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and computer vision at our GPU Technology Conference this week.

'I want to dedicate this prize to my colleagues,' said Luca Baldassarre, Gamaya's head of data science. 'I really love waking up every morning and going to work solving a great problem with great people, and this machine will really help the team to get these models running better, so hopefully we'll all live on a better planet as a result.'

The event's contenders were selected from among the 700 European startups participating in our Inception program, which accelerates the development of startups involved in AI and deep learning. These are early stage companies at their best.

After looking at an initial round of 25 startups, our judges chose companies we believe to be the five hottest in Europe to tell their stories.

Besides our winner Gamaya, the startups included presentations from:

• Intakhab Khan, founder,Automotive Artificial Intelligence - This startup offers a virtual 3D platform that replicates a realistic city environment for testing automotive driving software.
• Mika Rautiainen, CEO and founder,Valossa - What are my videos about and how could I benefit from that information? Valossa answers that question by creating AI software that understands video like a human.
• Angel Esteban, CEO,Restb.ai - Restb.ai uses deep learning to help industries identify and classify images, such as room type and home features for the real estate business, and genuine products versus frauds for online shopping sites.
• Lele Canfora, CEO,Deckard.ai - Deckard brings machine learning and process mining to project management to automate task effort estimation, completion-time forecasting, resources allocation and roadmap planning.

The Inception Awards continue the series of events we've held in Silicon Valley and China in conjunction with our GPU Technology Conference world tour. Our Inception virtual accelerator program supports more than 1,900 AI startups with GPUs, deep learning expertise and other resources to help them be successful.

Next stop, GTC Israel. See you in Tel Aviv.