Intel Ignite is a global startup support and accelerator program for deep technology companies in the early stages of development. Twice a year, Ignite runs a three-month acceleration program for 10 teams carefully selected from up to 300 applicants. Unlike many other similar programs, it's free.
“This program is very founder-friendly. We don't take any equity. There's no money involved. No one has to switch to Intel,” said Markus Bohl, managing director of Intel Ignite Europe. says.
Markus Bohl, Managing Director, Intel Ignite Europe
This program is part of Intel's efforts to maintain a pipeline of companies tackling difficult technology problems. At Intel, we believe in fostering an open, collaborative community of researchers and inventors outside of our internal walls, rather than doing all the work ourselves behind closed doors.
“It takes a whole ecosystem to build a successful deep technology because it's so hard. It's complex, it takes time, and there's so many things involved,” Ball said.
One of the recent entrants is cloud platform NodeShift. NodeShift has built a cloud platform that aggregates data centers around the world. The company claims that customers can access virtual machines, GPUs, compute, and storage for up to 80% cheaper compared to large public cloud providers.
“We partner with independent data centers that have 15% to 20% free capacity. We have access to that spare capacity at a low price, but we also meet customer requirements, such as uptime service level agreements. We're getting all the enterprise features we want and delivering them in a very nice package,” said Mihai Mărcuśă, co-founder of NodeShift.
Mihai Mărcuśă, NodeShift Co-Founder
These types of multicloud state management and workload orchestration challenges are notoriously difficult to perform. Technologies like Kubernetes have an attractive potential for customers to manage themselves, but success has proven difficult. The experience of well-resourced organizations shows how difficult workload portability really is, let alone on a global scale.
“As I said when we started the program, it's like sitting on a rocket. You don't know if it's exploding or taking off,” Marcushka said. “By the end of the program, it was clear we were taking off.”
Another Ignite participant is Pelanor, which deals with cloud cost management. As interest rates rise and the overall economy becomes more efficient, many companies are proposing ways to rein in cloud spending.
The relative complexity of cloud-native approaches such as microservices often obscures the true cost. The interconnectedness of systems makes it difficult to implement simple cost reductions. Reductions that are not properly considered can break the system or increase costs in other areas. Pelanor hopes to address this challenge by combining granular data with a holistic view of the system.
“We map the state of the entire cloud as a graph, showing the connections and usage between all those different components,” said Ido Kotler, co-founder and CPO of Pelanor. “This allows people to understand that if something costs more in one location, it's because something has changed in a particular service in another location.”
Ido Kotler, co-founder and CPO of Pelanor.
While it is possible to manually map these dependencies, the scale and pace of change in modern cloud environments is such that such maps become obsolete almost before they are complete. Pelanor helps customers automate processes and view the true cost impact of system design decisions, not just what is questionable.
System design changes are at the heart of ElectricSQL, another recent Ignite participant. ElectricSQL is a platform for building mobile-first software that eliminates the need to communicate with a backend database.
“Essentially, if you're building an app, like a mobile app or a web app, you just code against this local database, just like you would against a backend database, and everything works fine. ,” said co-founder James Arthur. He is the CEO of ElectricSQL.
James Arthur, Co-Founder and CEO, ElectricSQL
To say I'm skeptical of these claims is somewhat of an understatement of the matter, but I was somewhat unsettled by the description of the technology used. For example, ElectricSQL utilizes her Wasm to provide clients with his lightweight 3.7MB PostgreSQL database. These are cutting-edge technologies that weren't possible just a few years ago, and highlight the types of deep technologies Intel wants to support with his Ignite program.
“One of Intel's key strategic priorities is local AI. Instead of running models in the cloud, they can run on the user's local device,” Arthur said.
By putting the actual data on the client and connecting it more easily to backend data in the cloud, organizations can more effectively take advantage of the increased power of new remote devices. Intel has a clear incentive to foster a healthy ecosystem of customers for its products, especially in growth areas such as mobile devices and the Internet of Things.
“It's about open innovation. First, making startups successful, and then connecting with these inventors to benefit Intel. That's the important thing,” Ball said.
The Ignite program is an interesting way of thinking about investing to foster innovation. Far from venture capital or government subsidies, Intel has in many ways harkened back to earlier European models of corporate sponsorship. Investing for the long term like this requires a great deal of vision, especially when it comes to avoiding high-risk, high-return equity positions.
At a time when many are questioning the VC-centric approach to innovation, the Ignite program is a welcome experiment in a different way of doing things. Given Intel's recent struggles, the hope is that these investments will start to pay off sooner rather than later.
