Open call for participation in the acceleration program for innovative startups offering mentoring, technical support, Cloud resources and access to Huawei’s international marketplace

Milan, March 23, 2023 – Huawei Italia and SPICI – Society for Innovation, Cooperation and Internationalization – renew their collaboration and announce the second edition of Acceleration for Change, a technology acceleration program aimed at startups, spinoffs, SMEs and Independent Software Vendors that are interested in developing and validating in the European Huawei Public Cloud environment, innovative products, technologies, systems and processes in the fields of Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

The initiative, in continuity with the previous edition, aims to identify innovative solutions that are characterised by their solidity, sustainability, scalability and propensity to internationalisation, and then support their launch and consolidation on the market by providing, completely free of charge, Cloud resources, the guidance and technical support of Huawei’s specialised engineers who will provide skills, tools and methodologies, the possibility to win further prizes by participating in the EU Huawei Cloud Competition, a Go-to-Market strategy for business development at an international level, through Huawei’s marketplace, for those projects that will reach a high level of development.

The selected startups will also have access to the programmatic display platform “Petal Ads”, a full stack advertising solution developed entirely by Huawei, which will support them in the promotion of their brand and the positioning of their products/services, thus favouring the growth of their business.

The candidate projects can be solutions already developed or in the prototype stage, with applications in areas such as Green & Blue Innovation, Smart Agriculture, Smart Health, Smart Port, Smart Mobility, Smart City, Cultural & Creative Industry.

The selected companies will start a 6-month path during which they will be able to develop their Proof of Concept, technically supported by Huawei and assisted by SPICI in the growth of their business.

The first edition of the ‘Acceleration for Change’ program saw the awarding of the ‘Huawei Business Acceleration Award 2022’ to three innovative start-ups:

  • the Neapolitan Logogramma, with CODIUM, an AI-based platform for the creation of general purpose voice assistants capable of interacting in natural language with users and performing actions that respond to their needs, in different knowledge domains;
  • Blue Tensor of Trento with Eyerus, a visual inspection and object recognition platform consisting of a modular image acquisition and management system based on Deep Learning;
  • the Venetian company Urbana with its IoT platform for the realisation of end-to-end solutions, from hardware to software, in target markets.

“Startups are the future of the economy, bearers of enormous potential just waiting to be expressed. With an eye on the future, Huawei is committed to continue investing and collaborating with its partners to build robust and innovative startup ecosystems that can help drive digital transformation” – said Wilson Wang, CEO of Huawei Italy. “With the Acceleration for Change program, we aim to foster the growth of the Italian innovation ecosystem by identifying and accelerating the most promising realities to help them flourish through access not only to the technological resources of the European Huawei Public Cloud but also to an international marketplace and all the business opportunities it can offer”.

“The valuable collaboration between Huawei and SPICI is based on the possibility to grow and mature the Italian innovative ecosystem of technology startups and SMEs, which through the scouting and acceleration program, carried out with Open Innovation dynamics, will be able to benefit from a series of services aimed at developing the frontiers of innovation in the cloud. In this way, the best startups from all over Italy will have the opportunity to use tools and be guided by technical experts from Huawei’s Cloud Business Unit, as well as business development professionals from SPICI”. – Mariangela Contursi, General Manager of SPICI.

For more information, please visit www.acceleration4change.it where you can:

  • apply for the 2023 edition of the program by filling in the online application form by 30 May 2023;
  • register for the 3 Roadshow information sessions, that will be held on 5 April in Rome, 19 April in Milan and 9 May in Naples.