Banco Santander and Microsoft have joined the Oxentia Foundation, with the purpose of rewarding entrepreneurs and startups focused on finding innovative solutions in artificial intelligence.
In this sense, Banco Santander and Microsoft will launch a challenge in 11 countries, which will result in six winning projects that will receive three prizes of 10,000 euros for the best ‘startups’, and another three prizes of 90,000 euros for the three best ‘scaleups’.
The winning companies will travel to Silicon Valley to receive the award, and will be able to access Santander X 100, Banco Santander’s global entrepreneurship community that brings together the most outstanding projects accelerated by the entity chaired by Ana Botín.
This program provides companies with advice, training, connections to receive capital, clients, talent and ‘networking’. For its part, Microsoft opens the possibility of presenting their projects to the ‘venture capital’ of the M12 company, and will provide them with mentoring with AI experts.
The Santander X Global Challenge The AI Revolution challenge is aimed at firms from Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay. The registration deadline is April 27.
Diego Calascibetta, the global director of Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation at Santander Universities, has stressed the technological revolution that artificial intelligence implies, and has underlined the “key” role of innovation in this area.
Calascibetta also pointed out that “With this challenge, we want to support and accompany companies in this sector that share our vision of a technology destined to be very present in our lives much sooner than we thought.”