Jonathan Clarke is responsible for the activities specifically designed for startups that OVHcloud has developed to support the development of business innovation: “I deal with the whole area of southern Europe that includes Spain, Italy, Portugal, Malta, Greece, I am based in Madrid and I work together with Ilaria Navoni who is in Milan, but the OVHcloud startup program is all over the world – he tells Startupbusiness – and it is a very important program for us because we ourselves were a startup and then a scaleup until we became the first real French unicorn that then went public and therefore the startup mentality is part of our DNA”. The program was born six years ago and is characterized by being permanent, open, so interested startups can apply at any time and if their characteristics are in line with what OVHcloud deems interesting, they enter the path that includes up to 100 thousand euros of credits for the use of infrastructures and up to 20 hours of technical support from the company that has also developed a series of initiatives around the program to support the visibility of startups with events and webinars and has created a real ecosystem where there is no shortage of opportunities for meeting, networking and dialogue with potential industrial and financial partners. “The program lasts one year and provides different levels for early stage startups and scaleups, to date we have supported 4 thousand startups all over the world, today there are a thousand active of which 70 in Italy alone, a number that has doubled compared to the previous year and which places the country in fourth place for the number of participating startups after France, United Kingdom and Germany. We are transversal in terms of sectors but it is obvious that our program is interesting especially for those that need cloud, for example we have a good match with startups that deal with artificial intelligence, spacetech, quantum computing, among other things thanks to the collaboration with an Italian startup called Elemento we recently turned on our first quantum computer in France. We also collaborate with accelerators and incubators such as Bocconi4Innovation, LVenture, Nana Bianca and Lifegate for sustainability”.
Looking to the future
The program has no cost for startups, which on the contrary receive support and use of cloud platforms free of charge: “this program was created with the intent on the one hand to give our give-back to the ecosystem since OVHcloud was a startup, and on the other hand to leverage the ability of startups to look to the future, which allows us to access new technologies and solutions and therefore also to improve our products and then, Of course, today’s startups are tomorrow’s companies that will also need cloud services in the future as they grow. Passing the selection of the jury, is a selection that is not too restrictive since the approval rate exceeds 70%”. Currently, the program is active at all OVHcluod locations around the world: the United States, Canada (which is also responsible for Brazil), the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, India, Singapore, where it works in a total team of 15 people and, according to Clarke, does not involve acquisition or investment operations although, he says, In the past it has happened that a company was acquired, this is the case of Open.io that after participating in the program 5 years ago it became part of the group after three years, just as it is not excluded that in the presence of interesting technological solutions for operations, startups can also become suppliers of the French group. “For the future, we have recently launched the Fast Forward program which aims to give even greater support to startups in the growth phase, then scaleups through specific mentoring programs and we focus on AI with a fast track also on the GPU front, therefore of computing power,” concludes Clarke.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©