Huawei and SPICI launch the second edition of the Acceleration for Change program

The call for applications is open for the acceleration programme for innovative startups that offers mentoring, technical support, Cloud resources, and access to Huawei's international marketplace

Milan, 23 March 2023 – Huawei Italia and SPICI - Società per l’Innovazione, la Cooperazione e l’Internazionalizzazione - renew their collaboration and announce the second edition of Acceleration for Change, a technological acceleration programme aimed at startups, spin-offs, SMEs, and Independent Software Vendors interested in developing and validating innovative products, technologies, systems, and processes in the European Public Cloud Huawei environment in the fields of Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.

The initiative, in continuity with the previous edition, aims to identify innovative solutions characterized by solidity, sustainability, scalability, and a propensity for **internationalisation**, to support their launch and consolidation in the market by providing, completely free of charge, Cloud resources, guidance, and technical support from specialized Huawei engineers who offer skills, tools, and methodologies, the chance to win further prizes by participating in the EU Huawei Cloud Competition, a Go-to-Market strategy for international business development through the Huawei marketplace, for projects that reach a high level of development.

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

Candidate projects may be already developed solutions or prototypes applicable in fields such as Green&Blue Innovation, Smart Agriculture, Smart Health, Smart Port, Smart Mobility, Smart City, Cultural & Creative Industry.

The selected entities will embark on an approximately 6-month course during which they can focus on developing their Proof of Concept technically supported by Huawei and accompanied by SPICI in the growth of their business.

The first edition of the “Acceleration for Change” programme awarded three innovative startups with the “Huawei Business Acceleration Award 2022”:

• The Neapolitan Logogramma, with AI.CODIUM, an AI-based platform for creating general-purpose voice assistants capable of interacting in natural language with users and performing actions that meet their needs in various knowledge domains;

• The Trentino-based Blue Tensor with Eyerus, a visual inspection and object recognition platform consisting of a modular image acquisition and management system based on Deep Learning;

• The Venetian Urbana with its IoT platform for end-to-end solutions, from hardware to software, in key markets.

“Startups are the future of the economy, bringing with them enormous potential waiting to be expressed. Looking to the future, Huawei commits to continuing to invest and collaborate with its partners to build robust and innovative startup ecosystems that can help drive digital transformation” - stated Wilson Wang, CEO of Huawei Italia. “With the Acceleration for Change programme, we aim to foster the growth of Italy's innovation ecosystem by identifying and accelerating the most promising entities to help them flourish through access not only to the technological resources of the European Public Cloud Huawei 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 of growing and maturing the Italian innovative ecosystem of technology startups and SMEs, which, through the scouting and acceleration programme conducted with Open Innovation dynamics, will benefit from a series of services aimed at developing the frontiers of innovation in the cloud domain. In this way, the best startups from across Italy will have the opportunity to use tools and be guided by technical experts from Huawei's Cloud Business Unit as well as by business development professionals from SPICI”. - Mariangela Contursi, General Director of SPICI.

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

• submit your application for the 2023 edition of the programme by completing the online registration form by 30 May 2023;

• register for the informative sessions which will take place on 5 April in Rome, 19 April in Milan, and 9 May in Naples.