Supported by the scientific and technological services of the French embassies to the US and Canada, the NETVA programme (New Technology Venture Accelerator) helps young French businesses to find their feet across the Atlantic by introducing them to the contacts and resources they need to penetrate the North American market.
In 2017, 107 young innovative companies applied to the French national competition to participate in the NETVA program which offers a personalized support program in order to familiarize them with the North American markets.
Out of the 107 applications received, 20 start-ups were selected of which 2 “made in” Inria start-ups!
- iEx.ec develops blockchain-based distributed cloud computing
- Lybero.net develops encryption solutions (transfer, storage) offering a high level of security and ease of use, installation and operation.
They will each benefit from a one week immersion program respectively in San Francisco and Washington D.C.
About the 2017 Inria laureates
iEx.ec: iEx.ec aims at providing distributed applications running on the blockchain a scalable, secure and easy access to the services, the data-sets and the computing resources they need. This technology relies on the Ethereum smart contracts and allows building a virtual Cloud infrastructure that provides high-performance computing services on demand. iEx.ec leverages a set of research technologies that have been developed at the INRIA and CNRS research institutes in the field of Desktop Grid computing. The idea of Desktop Grid (aka Volunteer Computing [BOINC]) is to collect the computer resources underutilized on the Internet to execute very large parallel applications at the fraction of the cost of a traditional supercomputer. iEx.ec relies on XtremWeb-HEP, a mature, solid, and open-source Desktop Grid software which implements all the needed features : fault-tolerance, multi-applications, multi-users, hybrid public/private infrastructure, deployment of virtual images, data management, security and accountability, and many more. We can now organize decentralized infrastructures and market places, where everyone will be able to rent its computing resources (CPU, storage, GPU, …), where the innovative SMEs which design Big Data and HPC applications will be able to sell them online immediately with the needed resources to run them, and where highly valued data-sets will be rentable with a fine-grain business model.
Lybero.net: The goal of Lybero.net, the brand new startup from Inria Nancy – Grand Est, is to make the implementation of corporate data encryption simpler and more accessible. The Lybero.net project was born of necessity. “As the Information Systems Security Manager (ISSM) at Inria, I sought to expand the encoding of hard disks. I had to manage a multitude of different data encryption keys and passwords. I was looking for an existing solution that could ensure secure data storage but there wasn’t one, so I decided to develop my own tool.” explains Bertrand Wallrich. If someone who has encoded their disk forgets the password used to unlock it, the data will be irretrievable. “Most users try to memorise their password, but some write it down on a Post-it that they tuck away in a drawer or under their computer keyboard, which is not very secure. Also, the ISSM must be able to obtain the key to access encrypted data if he is required to do so.” Effectively, the ISSM has to be able to retrieve such data if the police ask him to or if a colleague goes absent. More here.
More information
About NETVA
Since 2010, NETVA has supported 88 startups. It is organized by the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the United States, in partnership with a total of thirty partners such as the Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation, Bpifrance, Business France, Conseillers du Commerce Extérieur de la France, Inria. More info : https://www.netvafrance.com/ – contact [at] netvafrance.com
