Meta has been working with Hugging Face, an open source community-driven platform that hosts machine learning models and tools, and Scaleway, a European cloud leader for AI infrastructure, on an “AI Startup Program” to accelerate the adoption of open-source AI solutions in Europe. Applications for the program are now open to startups from across the EU member states, with the aim of bringing the economic and technological benefits of open models to the broader ecosystem. 

The AI Startup Program is based at STATION F in Paris, allowing European startups to benefit from the resources available at the world’s largest startup campus. With the support of the HEC incubator, the program will accelerate five startups in the MVP or product stage, from September 2024 to February 2025. Startups from across the European Union are encouraged to apply, with a panel of experts from Meta, Hugging Face and Scaleway selecting projects based on open foundation models and/or demonstrating their plans to integrate these models into their products and services.

The startups selected will benefit from technical mentoring by research teams at Meta Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), the company’s artificial intelligence research laboratory, access to Hugging Face’s platform and tools, and Scaleway’s computing power in order to develop their services based on open source AI technology bricks. This program follows the first edition of the accelerator announced in November 2023, which supported Pollen Robotics, who are using Meta Llama and Segment Anything models to develop an open-source robotics platform, Fringuant, who are developing a body scan technology for fashion retailers, and Qevlar AI focused on strengthening cybersecurity. 

“For more than a decade Meta has been a pioneer in open innovation in AI, and through our publicly available, state of the art AI models, we’ve seen firsthand the impact they can have on the broader community. Our Llama models have been downloaded millions of times, with tens of thousands of new versions available on repositories like Hugging Face. Through this program we can help European developers innovate faster, bringing growth to their markets and propelling the European ecosystem forward.”  – Marco Pancini, Head of EU Affairs, Meta

“The success of Meta’s first AI startup program is a testament to Europe’s incredible AI talent and their enthusiasm for innovation driven by open and collaborative efforts. Hugging Face is excited to support the program’s second cohort through open-source!” – Clément Delangue, CEO and co-founder, Hugging Face

“As the European cloud’s leading provider of AI compute power, we are delighted to join forces once again with Meta and Hugging Face, for this new edition of our shared AI startup program. Scaleway’s cluster of several thousand NVIDIA H100 GPUs is Europe’s largest, which means startups can achieve new levels of innovation without any data leaving the continent. Combined with the power of open source models such as Llama, and the unique reach of Hugging Face, we’re honoured to empower the next generation of European AI startups” – Damien Lucas, CEO, Scaleway

“With all the momentum and enthusiasm in AI right now, Meta’s program at STATION F quickly became one of the most sought-after programs on campus. We are very excited to hear that Meta – along with their partners Hugging Face and Scaleway – are planning to bring the program to a European level in order to work with some of the region’s leading AI innovators.”  – Roxanne Varza, Director, Station F. 

Applications are open until 16 August 2024, and startups can apply via fb.me/AIStartupProgram.