Inception application auto-declined instantly at submission, no reason given, meets all published criteria - requesting review

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1

Hi NVIDIA team,

I submitted an Inception application for my AI startup and it was declined instantly at the moment of submission, fast enough that no human review could have taken place. The decline email gives no reason and says I can reapply after six months.

Some context, kept general here for privacy (happy to share the application details, company name and ID privately with NVIDIA staff):

  • Officially incorporated limited company, working website, at least one developer
  • Well under 10 years old, not a consultancy, reseller, cloud service provider or crypto company
  • We build products on open-weight LLMs and serve them on our own NVIDIA RTX PRO hardware (CUDA, TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang), and we are actively expanding our NVIDIA GPU fleet right now
  • I have already emailed inceptionprogram@nvidia.com and not yet received a response

I’ve read several recent threads here describing the same pattern (instant or unexplained declines, functional websites flagged as “not functional”, first-time applications flagged as reapplications), so I suspect an automated rule rather than an assessment of the application itself.

Could someone from the Inception team take a look? I’ll gladly DM the application details to any NVIDIA staff member.

@natashap @TomNVIDIA

Thank you

2

Hi @alexandros2,

Inception issues are not handled in the forums. Please allow them time to reply to your email.

3

We contacted inceptionprogram@nvidia.com almost two weeks ago, but we have not received any response yet. Could you please advise if there is a typical response time for these cases. Given that several applicants seem to be reporting similar issues recently, we would appreciate any guidance on the best way to get these cases reviewed.