Hi NVIDIA team,
My company, Lernex LLC (incorporated in Colorado, US), applied to NVIDIA Inception and was blocked instantly at submission by the portal. Inception email support has since told me three times that the block is because the application requires unique contact information for two different people (one developer, one business executive), and that solo founders are not eligible.
My concern: the public Inception FAQ at Join NVIDIA Inception for Startups lists these criteria - at least one developer, a working website, official incorporation, less than 10 years old, and not in an excluded category (consulting, crypto, cloud service provider, reseller, public company). Lernex meets every one of those. The FAQ says nothing about requiring two separate people, and “solo founders are not eligible” does not appear in any applicant-facing documentation I can find.
Lernex is a real AI company: an AI-powered personalized learning platform (https://www.lernex.net) plus custom education-specific model work published publicly under our Hugging Face org ( Lernex (Lernex) , e.g. Metis-1.4-base). As founder I currently hold both the developer and business-executive functions.
I have asked email support for either (a) the written applicant-facing policy stating solo-founder startups are ineligible, or (b) escalation to a program manager who can review this - and have received the same template response each time, most recently with a 6-month reapplication cooldown attached.
Could someone from the Inception program team clarify whether this is actual written policy or a portal contact-validation issue, and whether a manual review is possible? I have seen at least one case on these forums where a staff member was able to review the real rejection reason and approve a resubmission, which is all I am asking for here.
Thank you,
Giulianno Vollmer - Founder, Lernex LLC