UK Start-Ups To Compete For A Share Of $500,000 At Nvidia Event

Nvidia and its partners will give away $500,000 in prizes at the sixth annual Emerging Companies Summit in March – an event dedicated to start-ups that create disruptive business models using Graphic Processing Units (GPUs).

It will run alongside the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California.

The competition will see 35 finalists from 14 countries pitch their business ideas, including Global Valuation, WeSEE and Brytlyt from the UK.

Not just graphics

On 26 March, Nvidia will run several competitions for GPU-powered start-ups. The winner of the Early Stage Challenge, a brand new category, will receive $100,000 cheque on the spot, no strings attached. In order to get to the money, each of the 12 finalists will have to give an eight-minute presentation, and survive a grilling by the industry panel.

Meanwhile, the “One To Watch” award will go to the five most promising start-ups.

At the same time, 11 more young companies will participate in the ‘CEO on Stage’ event – a series of rapid-fire presentations followed by questions from a panel of industry experts.

Past participants in the Emerging Companies Summit include Oculus Rift – a company which is set to revolutionise the videogame industry with a high definition virtual reality headset that provides head motion tracking for a strong sense of immersion.

Three UK companies will be going to California in hopes of winning a share of the $500,000 prize pot. They include London-based Global Valuation, a small firm which develops a financial valuation and simulation engine accelerated by Nvidia K10 GPUs, designed to minimise investment risk.

Another participant, WeSEE, is an image recognition software company which is able to automatically create textual descriptions of content in images and videos, to be used in advertising, content verification and search. Among other things, WeSEE can identify adult content to protect brands from appearing alongside inappropriate images – something even the mighty GCHQ has had trouble with.

The third start-up from the UK is Brytlyt – it has created a big data analytics platform based on SQL technology that claims to outperform the competition thanks to proprietary GPU-powered algorithms and extensive use of Flash memory.

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