Founding and running a startup can be like learning to walk a tightrope and later finding there is no tightrope to walk.
Or, it can be intensely rewarding, sometimes moreso from the standpoint of personal or team achievement than financially.
Despite long odds, some engineering startups toil through and survive after years of effort, as (mostly) young engineers work on research, testing and retesting and trying to eek out funding from scarce investors. One approach has been to compete to win a placement in an accelerator program with a big company like Google or Intel where it is possible to learn from experts in the field and gain financial assistance while developing some new software or hardware, sometimes in hopes of developing novel tech that solves a problem and serves a group of customers.
It can be frustrating and maddening, as several heads of startups described recently at Intel Innovation.
“A startup is nothing but challenges. There’s very little probability you will succeed and you need all the help you can get,” said Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of MinIO.
His company is nothing but ambitious: It provides a high-performance software-defined object store that is built for largescale AI/ML, data lake and database workloads with a native Kubernetes operator integration. In other words, MinIO has grown up at a propitious moment in the world of generative AI, even though it was first birthed all the way back in 2014.
But to get this far, Periasamy credits Intel Capital, for its strategic investment in MinIO starting before the pandemic. “We found Intel Capital a wonderful partner...We got air cover during the Covid layoffs. We didn’t let go one employee.” Intel had earlier provided help by donating servers and core engineering talent.
“Intel understands that startups have no shortcuts and have to think long term. [By comparison], innovation is easy, talent is easy, funding is easy, but building a business around a product is a very hard thing.”
However, funding is not easy, based on experts, even though it might not have been the biggest challenge at MinIO. Analysts and others report that funding is not easy and the rate of inflation is not helping.
In one example, Axios surveyed hundreds of dealmakers recently and found just 20% expected an improvement in VC and private equity deals through the end of 2023 after a down year of 2022.
“It’s no secret it’s not easy days with funding. Everyone is trying to save money,” said Tzahi Weisfeld, general manager of Intel Ignite. “The tough environment makes sense for companies to come to us. There’s unbelievable talent out there.”
In actuality and despite the seeming odds, “It’s a pretty good time to found a start-up,” Weisfeld contended. “Good companies have access to funding and need to get the fundamentals right.”
Leslie Kanthan, a startup founder in the Intel Ignite program, said as an early stage startup, “It’s huge to have Intel backing you..You have Intel as your first customer. You need to show past revenues.” Kanthan, with a PhD in Math and Computer Science, co-founded Turin Tech in 2018. The company sits square in the midst of the generative AI explosion, offering code optimization services.
AI is expensive, especially for startups, and part of Intel’s work is make AI more mainstream, open and standards-based, officials said. “There are a lot of startups on the battlefield,” one Intel official said.
Elaheh Ahmadi, CEO and co-founder of Themis AI, an MIT spinout, said Intel Ignite has been a way to develop trustworthy AI where output is more reliable, factors that will matter across a range of tech, from autonomous vehicles to healthcare.
Aside from business and tech advice, as well as research insights, Periasamy said he has relied on Intel Capital executives for late night phone calls when problems arise. Intel also offers sessions on mental health and work-life balance for co-founders and their spouses.
“Work-life balance is important,” he said. “People just assume the founder is crazy.”
10 startups selected for third Ignite cohort
Intel Ignite announced 10 early-stage deep tech startups selected for its third US cohort on Oct. 2. Average seed funding for the companies is $6.8 million. They came from an application pool of 300 companies. Their innovations include cloud computing, health-tech, data management, AI and ML, power generation tech, vision systems and manufacturing optimization and sustainability tech.
An entire list of the 10 companies is online at Intel. Since Ignite started in 2019, 148 companies enrolled have secured $1.7 billion in funding. The program lasts 12 weeks.
The US based Intel Ignite team includes Mark Castleman, manager director; Reed Frerichs, deal flow and portfolio manager; Kelsie Pallanch, program manager; and Sharad Garg, chief technology officer.
In addition to Ignite and Intel Capital, Intel operates a free virtual program called Liftoff for early-stage startups using accelerated computing.