Innerspeech might be a highly technical startup rooted in complex fields like machine learning, neuroscience, and advanced linguistics, but its mission is deeply personal.
Founder and CEO Kenneth Wang Yau Li was inspired to create the company after witnessing his grandparents struggle to communicate after they suffered strokes, which can often cause ongoing language disorders called aphasia.
“It struck me that it would be really beneficial, both to the patient as well as to their family members, to create a way to help them restore certain aspects of their communication capabilities,” Li said. “I realized this could be necessary, not only for me, but for a lot of people out there whose loved ones suffer from these kinds of conditions.”
“If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s always great to have a risk-free environment to properly test out your ideas.”
Already an expert in linguistics and machine learning, Li channeled his knowledge into creating a solution. Unlike Neuralink, which uses invasive, ultra-thin brain probes to decode brain activity, Kitchener-Waterloo-based Innerspeech is developing a non-invasive approach that uses AI-powered software to translate raw brain signals or “inner speech” into text.
Of course, developing this AI requires significant training and computational power. To achieve this, Innerspeech needed a cloud provider that offered freedom, flexibility, and a secure environment to conduct its research. Through its membership with innovation hub Communitech, Innerspeech connected with OVHcloud, the global, European-based cloud provider that established a presence in Canada in 2012.
Germain Masse, Product Marketing Manager of AI and Data at OVHcloud, believes that an AI startup’s success often comes down to infrastructure.
“At the end of the day, you need resources, you need storage, and you need memory and compute,” he said. “Beyond providing compute, memory, and network resources, OVHcloud simplifies access to these high-performance resources as well as data collection and management through application layers that abstract the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.”
But these resources can be expensive to acquire for fledgling companies with limited capital. That’s where OVHcloud’s Startup Program comes in.
The 12-month program provides eligible early-stage and growth-stage startups with up to $140,000 CAD in cloud credits, allowing them to develop, test, and scale their tech solutions on the cloud.
These credits cover databases, storage, containers and compute products like GPUs—electronic circuits that have become table stakes for the development of AI—and offer startups affordable access to the resources they need.
OVHcloud is one of many cloud credit programs, but Startup Program Manager Katya Guez believes Canadian tech startups need specific elements of support.
“If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s always great to have a risk-free environment to properly test out your ideas,” Guez told BetaKit. “We try to provide that secure space for them to innovate on the cloud without having to pay, while also getting support and advice from cloud experts.”
Companies in OVHcloud’s Startup Program receive personalized mentoring to ensure they maximize the benefits of the program, as well as six hours of one-on-one consultation with an engineer to understand how to build their architecture on the cloud. It’s all part of what Guez described as the “personal touch” that OVHcloud looks to bring to growing companies.
“A lot of startup programs from other cloud providers will only offer an automated screen to interact with,” Guez said. “For the startups in our program, all of them have my direct contact. They get a dedicated account manager, whatever their stage.”
For Innerspeech, OVHcloud’s performance-price ratio was particularly beneficial. Li noted that Innerspeech needed a specific GPU size, and using competing cloud providers to acquire that hardware would have doubled their costs.
“There are a variety of GPUs with different technical specifications. Some cloud providers streamline their GPU offerings by focusing on a single aspect of performance,” Li said. “For our project, we had a specific need for large memory bandwidth, which OVHcloud was able to meet.”
In addition to offering economical solutions for startups, Guez said the program also encourages its companies to be aware of what they’re spending. “We want to make sure that we empower startups and founders to innovate in a healthy way,” she added.
In her work with startups, Guez encourages founders to monitor their costs throughout the program and to ask as many questions as needed to determine if their architecture is optimized for their needs and whether smarter choices could be made to reduce costs.
“We’ve heard a lot of horror stories from companies that have used other services and experienced surprise billings at the end of the month, only used a fraction of what they were paying for, or seen their cloud costs go all over the place,” Guez added. “Those kinds of things are what we want to avoid, and we’re radically transparent in the way that we communicate pricing and consumption data.”
Guez mentioned that the program aims to extend transparency beyond just price. Given the resource intensiveness of technology such as AI, its impact can also be significant from a climate perspective. OpenAI, for example, produced the equivalent of 500 tons of carbon dioxide to train its GPT-3 model. To address this, OVHcloud provides its customers and startups with a carbon calculator, allowing them to better understand the carbon footprint of their cloud usage.
Another key benefit of the Startup Program, according to Guez, is the fact that participants are not locked in to OVHcloud, which means startups have the opportunity to move their workloads anywhere, including to other clouds.
“During the course of a tech startup’s life, they might be pivoting a lot, and they might be rethinking their architecture or redeveloping certain components or iterating on those, and avoiding vendor lock-in from the start is strategically important for entrepreneurs,” Guez said.
For Masse, the absence of vendor lock-in reflects OVHcloud’s desire to democratize access to AI. He pointed out that in the current AI race, major hardware providers, cloud services, and AI model developers are all vying for global dominance, and often do so by operating in closed-source ecosystems where the source code is proprietary.
Masse noted that OVHcloud’s European roots give it a different perspective when it comes to privacy and ensuring that users have control over their data.
“These closed-source applications are, in our opinion, not going the right way,” he said. “We want to develop and support open-source AI in order to help players collaborate and not just to create monopolies.”
Four months into the Startup Program, Li said that Innerspeech has already seen significant progress, bolstered by additional computational power. The startup is currently ranked seventh in the 2024 Brain-to-Text Benchmark, a competition focused on reducing the error rate of brain-computer speech interfaces.
The competition organizers found that brain-computer interfaces generally have a 23 percent word error rate. Innerspeech has already managed to slash the error rate in half to 10.08 percent. Next month, the startup is set to release a new model targeting an eight percent error rate.
“That has really pushed us to where we can trust this to be something usable for patients,” Li added.
As the startup prepares for patient testing later this year, Li anticipates growing computational demands and is already eyeing OVHcloud as a long-term partner to meet these needs.
For her part, Guez believes Innerspeech is a “great representation” of how OVHcloud is looking to fill the resource gap for high-tech startups.
“Whether AI is their core offering or just an enabler, we’re seeing more startups needing these compute resources, and we want our infrastructure to support them through this new AI wave,” she said. “There are many great innovations stemming from Canada’s tech ecosystem that are solving important challenges across industries, and we aim to provide startups with the right foundation to scale.”
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Apply now for OVHcloud’s Startup Program.
Feature image courtesy Innerspeech.