Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:04):
We're in Copenhagen for DTW Ignite 2025. I'm here with Chris Penrose, he's Global VP of Business Development for the Telco sector at NVIDIA. Chris, great to see you. Great to be with you. So tell us about the Telco AI fellowship and why NVIDIA and AWS decided to form it.

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (00:24):
Absolutely. So at NVIDIA and at AWS, we have rich ecosystems of startup community and we wanted to find a way to also work with the telcos to expose them to this amazing set of companies and also provide an easy way for them to engage and interact and ultimately procure those types of relationships. And so we took the very best of what AWS has, the best of what NVIDIA has is called inception. We found companies that actually were using NVIDIA tools and using AWS, and we curated a set of great companies that the telcos can now easily adopt and begin to see the real impacts to helping transform their operations with AI.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:07):
Okay. And what would you say are the key challenges facing the telco sector that this program is specifically addressing?

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (01:16):
So I'd say there's some challenges for the telco and then some challenges for the startups and so on. The telco, I think it's really, telcos are looking at how can they truly look at every part of their operations and find the right solutions to be able to make immediate impact, but they don't necessarily always have the strongest reach into the startup or the developer world. On the flip side, the developers have created amazing solutions, but they might not have the ability to transact and drive procurement through a large telco. And so it's really about bringing this kind of be the easy button we talked about of telcos have great big standing relationships with AWS on the present way in which they transact, and how can we now onboard these new ISVs into this program. It allows the telcos to engage with them through their current AWS relationship.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:17):
And diving a little deeper into that, how does the program actually work? What kind of support and resources might the fellows get?

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (02:25):
Yeah, so we're all about helping not only introduce the fellows to telcos, but also give them exposure like events like we're here today here in Copenhagen where we've got multiple of our new fellows that are onsite and are showcasing their different solutions. And I think that we have three in the AWS booth here today exposing them at events, also helping give them training and tools and engaging them with our engineering resources to help them optimize their solutions. These are all the ways in which we're engaging to help these great new startups be able to build the best products and get exposed to the telco ecosystem.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:03):
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Can you tell us a little bit more about what is being showcased here at this particular event?

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (03:10):
Yeah, absolutely. So personal AI is a very cool startup that they are doing work to create agents for small businesses. So think about replacing the traditional IVR system. Businesses can now have an agent that knows everything about their business. And when you call that business, you're going to be intercepted by the agent that's going to now be able to answer all the questions for you. And so this is really democratizing the ability to do agentic AI all the way down to the smallest of businesses. So they're great. It is a very exciting company that is doing work around creating models to do talk to your end devices. And so being able to, in the iot world, being able to talk the language of these sensors and being able to really unlock the ability to put AI, generative AI on top of their IOT businesses is a great place in which archetype is playing. And so there's some great solutions out there for me.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:13):
And from the telco side of thing, how are these solutions impacting the way they're transforming their businesses?

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (04:21):
So I think in case some of them are going to help them actually drive cost savings, some are also going to help them make money. And so in the case of person AI, this will be a new service that they can bring out into the market. And same with archetype. So personally, this could be a new revenue generation service the telcos could bring to their business customers. In the case of archetype, this could be a value added AI service that they could bring on top of their current IOT offerings in the market. And I think in the case of Brea, each of them is helping in a unique way, but all good things for the telcos.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:55):
Okay. And how do you see the Telco AI fellowship moving forward and how can companies get involved?

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (05:03):
So we're just getting started, which is great. We want to see more and more of these up and coming startups become part of the program. So we've now created a website. There's a way for people to ask to join. And we're also looking also through our different startup programs and trying to curate additional partners that we might be aware of as well through both companies. So both kind of a push from us as we know at the company levels, but also an ability for anyone to be able to come in and apply. And the goal is to continue to grow this list and also be able to really drive meaningful engagements across telcos around the world.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:44):
Okay. Excellent. Well, Chris, thanks so much for telling us about the program. Really interesting to hear any way in which startups can engage more with the telco community. So exciting times.

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (05:54):
Thank you. Very excited to be doing it here with AWS, and we're very excited for what the telcos are going to be able to experience by working with this great startup community.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:02):
Okay, thank you.

Chris Penrose, NVIDIA (06:03):
Thanks so much.