NVIDIA is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to support global AI startups across industries — with an initial focus on healthcare and life sciences companies.
Announced today at the HLTH healthcare innovation conference, the initiative connects the startup ecosystem by bringing together the NVIDIA Inception global program for cutting-edge startups and Microsoft for Startups to broaden innovators’ access to accelerated computing by providing cloud credits, software for AI development and the support of technical and business experts.
The first phase will focus on high-potential digital health and life sciences companies that are part of both programs. Future phases will focus on startups in other industries.
Microsoft for Startups will provide each company with $150,000 of Microsoft Azure credits to access leading AI models, up to $200,000 worth of Microsoft business tools, and priority access to its Pegasus Program for go-to-market support.
NVIDIA Inception will provide 10,000 ai.nvidia.com inference credits to run GPU-optimized AI models through NVIDIA-managed serverless APIs; preferred pricing on NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which includes the full suite of NVIDIA Clara healthcare and life sciences computing platforms, software and services; early access to new NVIDIA healthcare offerings; and opportunities to connect with investors through the Inception VC Alliance and with industry partners through the Inception Alliance for Healthcare.
Both companies will provide the selected startups with dedicated technical support and hands-on workshops to develop digital health applications with the NVIDIA technology stack on Azure.
Supporting Startups at Every Stage
Hundreds of companies are already part of both NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups, using the combination of accelerated computing infrastructure and cutting-edge AI to advance their work.
Artisight, for example, is a smart hospital startup using 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 over 2,000 cameras and microphones at Northwestern Medicine, in Chicago, and over 200 other hospitals.
The company uses speech recognition models 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 including NVIDIA Riva for conversational AI, NVIDIA DeepStream for vision AI and NVIDIA Triton Inference server to simplify AI inference in production.
“Access to the latest AI technologies is critical to developing smart hospital solutions that are reliable enough to be deployed in real-world clinical settings,” said Andrew Gostine, founder and CEO of Artisight. “The support of NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups has enabled our company to scale our products to help top U.S. hospitals care for thousands of patients.”
Another company, Pangaea Data, is helping healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical companies identify patients who remain undertreated or untreated despite available intelligence in their existing medical records. The company’s PALLUX platform supports clinicians at the point of care by finding more patients for screening and treatment. Deployed with NVIDIA GPUs on Azure’s HIPAA-compliant, secure cloud environment, PALLUX uses the NVIDIA FLARE federated learning framework to preserve patient privacy while driving improvement in health outcomes.
PALLUX helped one healthcare provider find 6x more cancer patients with cachexia — a condition characterized by loss of weight and muscle mass — for treatment and clinical trials. Pangaea Data’s platform achieved 90% accuracy and was deployed on the provider’s existing infrastructure within 12 weeks.
“By building our platform on a trusted cloud environment, we’re offering healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies a solution to uncover insights from existing health records and realize the true promise of precision medicine and preventative healthcare,” said Pangaea Data CEO Vibhor Gupta. “Microsoft and NVIDIA have supported our work with powerful virtual machines and AI software, enabling us to focus on advancing our platform, rather than infrastructure management.”
Other startups participating in both programs and using NVIDIA GPUs on Azure include:
- Artificial, a lab orchestration startup that enables researchers to digitize end-to-end scientific workflows with AI tools that optimize scheduling, automate data entry tasks and guide scientists in real time using virtual assistants. The company is exploring the use of NVIDIA BioNeMo, an AI platform for drug discovery.
- BeeKeeperAI, which enables secure computing on sensitive data, including regulated data that can’t be anonymized or de-identified. Its EscrowAI platform integrates trusted execution environments with confidential computing and other privacy-enhancing technologies — including NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs — to meet data protection requirements and protect data sovereignty, individual privacy and intellectual property.
- Niramai, a startup that has developed an AI-powered medical device for early breast cancer detection. Its Thermalytix solution is a low-cost, portable screening tool that has been used to help screen over 250,000 women in 18 countries.
Building on a Trove of Healthcare Resources
Microsoft earlier this year announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to boost healthcare and life sciences organizations with generative AI, accelerated computing and the cloud.
Aimed at supporting projects in clinical research, drug discovery, medical imaging and precision medicine, this collaboration brought together Microsoft Azure with NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an end-to-end, scalable AI platform for developers.
It also provides users of NVIDIA DGX Cloud on Azure access to NVIDIA Clara, including domain-specific resources such as NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI platform for drug discovery; NVIDIA MONAI, a suite of enterprise-grade AI for medical imaging; and NVIDIA Parabricks, a software suite designed to accelerate processing of sequencing data for genomics applications.
Join the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub and the NVIDIA Inception program.