NVIDIA — NVIDIA Inception
Free to join, no fees and no equity. The direct value is preferred pricing on select NVIDIA hardware and software, free cloud credits from NVIDIA and its partners, and free self-paced technical training. The indirect value is often bigger: Inception Capital Connect makes investor introductions, and membership is a recognized signal that unlocks better tiers in other programs.
What you need to qualify
- Officially incorporated and less than 10 years old
- Employ at least one developer
- Maintain an official company website
Traps and exclusions
- Consulting and outsourced development firms
- Cryptocurrency companies
- Cloud service providers, resellers and distributors
- Public companies
Before you submit
- Company domain email, not a personal address
- Live public website that describes a product, not a coming-soon page
- Company profile findable on LinkedIn, X or GitHub
- Incorporation documents and funding evidence to hand
- Confirm the company has not claimed credits from this program before, under any entity
Other programs in this category
The amount is set per company and based on the partner organization, with a $10,000 monthly spend ceiling on credited usage. Comes with 15 months of free Standard-tier support, one-on-ones with DigitalOcean PMs and engineers, and a partner perk bundle from 15+ ecosystem companies. Watch the carve-out: core credits do not cover GPU Droplets or dedicated inference.
One of the more generous open-model inference programs, with the allocation scaling by which partner refers you. Useful if you are serving Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek or other open weights and want to move off per-token frontier pricing without standing up your own GPUs.
Serverless GPU credits as a one-time grant, with direct access to Modal's engineering team and go-to-market help around launches and fundraising. Modal does not publish amounts. The Seed to Series A track needs either a partner-network VC or more than $1M raised from any fund; the Series B+ track needs $30M+ raised and a partner-network investor.