On 27 October, the EIT Digital Challenge 2022 finals took place in Brussels, awarding 5 scaleups with excellent chances to become dominant players in the international deep tech landscape.
The event also marked the culmination of a newly established collaboration between EIT Digital and the Open Edge and HPC Initiative (OEHI).
OEHI focuses on fostering the development of an open and feature-rich ecosystem for technologies based on ARM and RISC-V, two of the main CPU architectures for microcontrollers, microprocessors, and mobile systems.
The partnership with EIT Digital was aimed at scouting promising European scaleups developing solutions in the HPC, digital twins, edge computing or AI domains that could be integrated into this ecosystem and, by collaborating with EIT Digital, OEHI could also receive international visibility across EIT Digital's pan-European innovation ecosystem.
Both goals were met by proactively engaging the OEHI in setting up the 2022 edition of the EIT Digital Challenge.
"We found the EIT Digital Challenge to be a perfect platform for scaleups to showcase their innovation and passion in their field of expertise. This platform attracts a large diversity of very innovative, deep-tech companies and offers the opportunity to help them to leverage opportunities arising from high-performance computing as well as the emerging compute continuum. We are looking forward to engaging with these scaleups and are happy to continue supporting EIT Digital's efforts in this field," says Prof. Dirk Pleiter, Director of the PDC Center at KTH, one of OEHI's supporting organisations.
Prof. Dirk Pleiter, Director of the PDC Center at KTH
The organization sponsored a Special Prize (1 year of Accelerator support, worth 50,000 euros) of the EIT Digital Challenge, which went to Spanish company Multiverse Computing, a scaleup which develops portfolio optimization, risk analysis and market simulation solutions for companies from the financial industry wanting to gain an edge with quantum computing.
Enrique Lizaso and Marta Garcia, CEO and CFO of Multiverse Computing
"We believe that a synergy between quantum and HPC can provide us with hybrid solutions that will translate into a real advantage in real use cases with clients. Leveraging HPC and quantum is a very promising strategy in the short term. We are very excited about this opportunity, and we look forward to the potential collaborations between OEHI and Multiverse," say Enrique Lizaso and Marta Garcia, CEO and CFO of Multiverse Computing.
Karthee Sivalingam, OEHI HPC and AI industry development consultant
Besides that, the OEHI was given access to Challenge finalists that expressed interest in a collaboration and will select other companies that will receive a few perks, namely:
3 years of free OEHI membership, which includes free access to training and hackathons
One year of free consultancy on how to adapt the scaleups' solution to the HPC environment
Access to OEHI's HPC clusters in Germany and Italy
"Today, edge computing and high-performance computing are key enabling technologies across a wide range of essential industries, from manufacturing to healthcare. The partnership with OEHI brought significant value to the competition, not just for the special prize that it bestowed, but also because it gave participating scaleups a fantastic opportunity to leverage these technologies at maximum scale. We are very happy with the collaboration, and we look forward to renewing it in the future," says Federico Menna, EIT Digital's interim CEO.
Sign up for updates
Receive the latest news and events updates by subscribing to our newsletter.
