ESA, the European Space Agency, and OVHcloud, a European cloud services company, announce that they have reached an agreement that consolidates their collaboration to support innovative start-ups in the space sector with a focus on AI and sustainability.
The renewal of the partnership is part of the ESA Partnership Initiative for Commercialization (EPIC), which aims to boost entrepreneurship and commercial opportunities for European startups, involving ESA’s business incubation centres (ESA BICs), ESA’s technology brokers, ESA Phi-LabNET as well as ESA Φ-lab ESRIN and ESA InCubed, and the space agency’s synergies with the OVHcloud Startup Program.
A constant of the collaboration between ESA and OVHcloud is the focus on innovation, with an approach that at the same time allows the best technologies to be used without the need for the start-ups involved to have all the specific technical expertise on the solutions adopted or dedicated infrastructure. Precisely for this reason, one of the objectives of the partnership is to promote the use of OVHcloud AI Endpoints solutions within the ESA Commercialisation Networks. AI Endpoints enables developers to enhance their applications with AI APIs in a simple way. The serverless platform, which requires no artificial intelligence expertise or dedicated infrastructure, hosts a number of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models, such as LLM, language processing, translation, speech recognition image recognition.
Startups and scaleups in the space sector that benefit from the collaboration between ESA and OVHcloud will also be able to apply for the OVHcloud Fast Forward Accelerator, which will provide additional technical and commercial support to selected companies in the AI sector. The first round of the AI Accelerator will run from January to April 2025, with a deadline for applications set for 24 November 2024.
A further common ground for action and an area in which both the European Space Agency and OVHcloud have an established tradition is sustainability, understood as the common pursuit of clear objectives and specific targets leading to concrete global change.
“Today is one of the dates to remember in the history of our collaboration with ESA. Not only do we confirm a long-term partnership, but we focus it even more strongly on innovation and sustainability, a combination embodied by the most virtuous start-ups in the space sector. These realities will be able to take advantage of our support and benefit, I am thinking in particular of the Italian ones, from the services available in the new Local Zone in Milan,’ John Gazal, OVHcloud’s Vice President South Europe and Brazil, commented in a note.
“The extension of the partnership with OVHcloud under the EPIC framework, after a couple of fruitful years, will bring further benefits in the field of innovation to both ESA-supported startups and OVHcloud. The partnership is now also integrating elements such as sustainability and artificial intelligence, to ensure that the European ecosystem of space startups develops in a way that is both profitable and responsible,’ says Geraldine Naja, director for commercialisation, industry and competitiveness at ESA.
OVHcloud and ESA’s Earth Observation Programme Directorate also boast a collaboration that has contributed to innovative advances in Earth observation research. The use of the OVHcloud cloud infrastructure has enabled the storage, management and analysis of large amounts of Earth Observation data collected by satellites and will enable ESA researchers to better understand and respond to climate change, natural disasters and ecological challenges, in accordance with the sustainability goals promoted by this partnership.
The ongoing collaboration between ESA and OVHcloud demonstrates the power of innovation and technology. By bringing together these two major areas of interest, Earth observation and cloud computing, we are demonstrating how cutting-edge digital solutions can enhance our ambitious exploration and learning efforts, paving the way for a smarter, more connected future,” says Simonetta Cheli, director of ESA’s Earth Observation programmes.
This collaboration extends to cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing, which enables start-ups to access quantum computer emulators on the OVHcloud. In the future, quantum computing will play a key role in accelerating use cases related to optimisation and simulation. This synergy will help entrepreneurs exploit these advanced technologies, enabling the application of innovative solutions and improving the efficiency of space operations. (photo by NASA on Unsplash)
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