NVIDIA is looking for a dozen would-be competitors for next year’s Early Stage Challenge, which takes place as part of its Emerging Companies Summit (ECS). In this seventh annual contest, hot young startups using GPUs vie for a single $100,000 grand prize.

Here’s how NVIDIA’s Group Director Business Development, Alain Tiquet, describes the challenge: “CEOs get four minutes to pitch their company to a panel of venture capitalists, and then another four minutes to handle questions. The VCs, together with the audience, immediately choose a winner. To raucous applause, the beaming CEO lopes back on stage to an outsized $100,000 check. It will all take place in a furious two hours at our sixth annual GPU Technology Conference, on March 17-20, in Silicon Valley, which last year drew some 3,400 attendees from 40-plus countries.”

Last year’s winner, Map-D, uses a high-speed GPU in-memory database to bring interactivity to big data in vivid ways. It can, for example, process billions of tweets in just a few milliseconds and provide real-time visual analysis of the data. Winning the Early Stage Challenge helped the San Francisco-based startup create momentum for it to launch and close its first round of funding of $1.5 million from NVIDIA, Google Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

“The Early Stage Challenge helped us turn the corner in terms of visibility and external credibility,” said Todd Mostak, co-founder of Map-D, which is using the new funds to develop the first release of the Map-D big-data analytics and visualization platform. “It was a bit nerve wracking but a great experience for us.”

Map-D isn’t the first startup to get a huge boost from participating at GTC. More than a dozen of those featured have gone on to be acquired — or to grow their business exponentially. The list includes

• Oculus Rift (2013), acquired by Facebook for $2 billion
• Gaikai (2012), acquired by Sony for $380 million
• Natural Motion (2008), which was acquired by Zynga for $527 million

NVIDIA is seeking seed-funded companies that have raised no more than $1 million in total capital and use GPU technologies in areas such as computing, visualization, analytics, entertainment, automotive, cloud or mobile.

All accepted applications will be offered a free demonstration space in the GTC 2015 exhibition hall, where they will be able to present product demos and participate in networking among companies, investors, key decision makers, and leading consumer, business and trade press.

To apply, complete the form at http://www.gputechconf.com/present/early-stage-challenge

Questions may be submitted to GTC_Content@nvidia.com

Deadline: The call for applications closes at 11:59 PM (Pacific) on Monday, January 19, 2015.  

Final notifications will be sent by Sunday, February 1, 2015.