NVIDIA and Microsoft Give AI Startups a Double Degree of Acceleration

NVIDIA is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to support global AI applications across industries – with an initial focus on healthcare and life sciences companies.

Announced today at the HLTH healthcare innovation conference, the move aligns the startup ecosystem by bringing together NVIDIA’s global Inception program for early-stage startups and Microsoft for Startups to expand access to fast computing by providing cloud loans, software for AI development and technical and business support.

The first phase will focus on top digital health and life science companies that are part of both programs. Future phases will focus on starting other industries.

Microsoft for Startups will give each company $150,000 in Microsoft Azure credits to access leading AI models, up to $200,000 worth of Microsoft business tools, and early access to its Program Pegasus for go-to-market support.

NVIDIA Inception will provide 10,000 points of ai.nvidia.com to run GPU-enhanced AI models through NVIDIA-managed APIs; select pricing on NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which includes the full line of NVIDIA Clara healthcare and life sciences computing platforms, software and services; early access to NVIDIA’s new healthcare offerings; and opportunities to connect with investors through the Inception VC Alliance and industry partners through the Inception Alliance for Healthcare.

Both companies will provide selected startups with dedicated technical support and hands-on training to develop digital health applications with the NVIDIA technology stack on Azure.

Supporting Startups at Every Stage

Hundreds of companies are already part of NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups, using a combination of fast computing devices and advanced AI to advance their work.

Artisight, for example, is an intelligent hospital startup that uses AI to improve operational efficiency, documentation and care coordination in order to reduce the administrative burden on clinical staff and improve the patient experience. Its smart hospital network includes more than 2,000 cameras and microphones at Northwestern Medicine, Chicago, and more than 200 other hospitals.

The company uses speech recognition systems that can automate patient check-in with voice-enabled kiosks and computer vision models that can alert nurses when a patient is at risk of falling. Its products use software that includes NVIDIA Riva for AI communication, NVIDIA DeepStream for AI visualization and the NVIDIA Triton Inference server to facilitate the creation of AI in production.

“Access to the latest AI technologies is critical to developing smart hospital solutions that are reliable enough to be used in real-world situations,” said Andrew Gostine, founder and CEO of Artisight. “The support of NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups has helped our company expand our products to help top US hospitals care for thousands of patients.”

Another company, Pangea Data, helps health care organizations and pharmaceutical companies identify patients who remain untreated or undertreated despite the intelligence in their existing medical records. The company’s PALLUX platform supports doctors at the point of care by accessing more patients for diagnosis and treatment. Embedded with NVIDIA GPUs in Azure’s HIPAA-compliant, secure cloud environment, PALLUX uses NVIDIA FLARE’s integrated learning framework to preserve patient privacy while improving health outcomes.

PALLUX helped a healthcare provider find 6x cancer patients with cachexia – a condition characterized by weight loss and muscle wasting – for treatment and clinical trials. The Pangea Data platform achieved 90% accuracy and was deployed into the client’s existing systems within 12 weeks.

“By building our platform on a trusted cloud environment, we provide healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies with a solution to uncover data from existing health records and realize the promise of reality of precision medicine and preventive healthcare,” said Pangea Data CEO Vibhor Gupta. “Microsoft and NVIDIA have supported our work with powerful machines and AI software, enabling us to focus on improving our platform, rather than managing infrastructure.”

Other startups participating in both programs and deploying NVIDIA GPUs on Azure include: