At a recent panel discussion, four Luxembourg-based startups shared their journey from early-stage ideas to scalable innovation.
Their stories illustrated how LuxProvide’s support is transforming access to high-performance computing and enabling young companies to test, validate and grow their technologies. Together, they demonstrated why accessible supercomputing is becoming essential for early-stage ventures.
More Than Just Computing Power
Over the past two years, LuxProvide has supported more than 50 startups, delivering +43.000 GPU node-hours, +38.000 CPU node-hours and over 500 hours of expert consulting. The programme spans sectors including space, fintech, biotech and cybersecurity, reflecting the broad relevance of HPC.
These resources are not designed for production-scale operations. Instead, their purpose is ‘’to help startups test assumptions, benchmark performances and validate architecture,’’ explains Vittorio Santonocito, Head of Startup at LuxProvide. In addition to computing power, teams receive expert guidance to optimise their workflows and technical choices.
Four Startup Journeys in Practice
The four startups represent a wide range of industries, from construction and forestry to space technology and retail.
Space Time collects spatial and temporal data for construction, forestry and mining.
‘’Our main business model is to analyse the progress of construction sites, to see the developments on a day-by-day basis, and then also turn the data back in time to understand what happened in the past,’’ explained Shahriar Agaajani.
Symbiose Management, meanwhile, builds what it describes as a ‘’Bloomberg for forests’’, combining satellite data and LiDAR to analyse ecosystems for natural capital investors. The team grew from 3 to 15 people.
Spaider Space develops two solutions: one focused on space domain LLMs, and another that automates daily workflows in the space industry via an agentic AI.
Desai applies computer vision to help consumers find furniture. After ChatGPT only achieved 50% accuracy on style recognition tasks, the team trained custom models on 90 million data points, increasing accuracy to 80%.
Breaking Infrastructure Barriers
Desai’s experience illustrates infrastructure challenges many startups face at early-stage. Training models on 300.000 hand-labelled images repeatedly overwhelmed standard cloud infrastructure. ‘’We constantly were crashing the AWS machines because the models were just too big,’’ founder Crystal van Oosterom recalled. MeluXina solved multiple problems. ‘’First, we needed big machines. Secondly, we’re proud of being European, so training models in Luxembourg is valuable. And INITIATE was free,’’ she explained. The team now trains on 90 million data points with 80% accuracy.
Beyond computing power, data volume itself proved to be a major obstacle for several startups. Symbiose Management encountered memory crashes exceeding 90 gigabytes processing geospatial datasets. ‘’You must think of scalable infrastructure from day one. This is why we applied for Fit4Start and if we wouldn’t have unlocked this access, there would have been no way to go further,’’ Marwen emphasised. Space Time pivoted from construction to forestry during crises, guided by Darwin’s principle: ‘’It’s not the strongest species that survives, it’s the species that adapts best.’’
Expert Support Drives Efficiency
Technical expertise proved just as critical as hardware. ‘’MeluXina had experts who understood not just model fine-tuning, but how hardware and code actually work, and how to optimise that,’’ Crystal emphasised. Space Time discovered this during point cloud classification, finding open-source solutions covering 60-70% of needs. ‘’We were able to plug in and play. This was very cost efficient,’’ Shahriar Agaajani underlined.
Pathway to Advanced Programmes
LuxProvide creates pathways to larger initiatives. Spaider Space progressed from INITIATE programme to AI Factory engagement, now training foundation models for space applications. ‘’We’re envisioning this as homegrown, developed in Luxembourg and serving the European space ecosystem,’’ founder Loveneesh explained.
Together, these experiences show how accessible HPC has become a fundamental enabler for Luxembourgish and European startups. By combining computing resources with hands-on expertise and responsive support, LuxProvide helps startups validate ideas, attract talent and build scalable technical foundations. ‘’We are so lucky to have a supercomputer in our backyard that commercial entities can use. I don’t think people realise how special that is, plus the government is incredibly supportive,’’ one founder concluded.
