The world of startups is evolving very quickly, and Africa has become one of the continents with the greatest potential in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship.
OVHcloud has already been supporting startups since 2015. This program has received about 12,000 applications, of which more than 4,000 have been through the program, mainly early stage startups, in France and Europe.
Who is OVHcloud?
As Europe’s leading cloud provider, we deliver public and private cloud products, shared hosting and dedicated server solutions in 140 countries worldwide. We also offer domain name registration, telephony services and internet access to our customers. Founded in 1999, OVHcloud is a French company with an international presence, based on a backbone of datacenters and points of presence spread across the globe.
With the support of our ecosystem, we have been working hard for more than 20 years to offer a trusted, reliable and sustainable cloud. With more than 400,000 servers spread across over 43 datacenters in 4 continents, OVHcloud is a global player and offers a wide range of solutions to more than 1.6 million customers.
Since 2020, a new version of the Startup Program has been launched to provide even better support for startups and scaleups throughout the world, with new and exciting changes; including an offering for scaleups with access of up to €100,000 in cloud credits and 20 hours of technical consultation time. Adding an offering for scaleups means that we can support startups along their entire journey from idea to IPO. The new Startup Program also provides an improved customer experience, with more technical support and access to market and funding opportunities through our Fast Forward accelerator. The value proposition is clear: whether you need to host your first website or deliver a FinTech app using sensitive payment data, OVHcloud can provide a cloud solution for you that delivers the best price/performance ratio on the market and scales effortlessly as you grow.
In addition to the Scale level discussed above, the Startup Program also has a Start level. The Start level is for those with a great idea; they might be building their first (or tenth) MVP or looking for trusted and cost-efficient infrastructure in the early stages of their business. This level offers €10,000 of free credits to use on our cloud solutions and 6 hours of project-specific technical consultation.
Our ambition today is to accelerate in Africa and propose our program to startups, whatever their level of development.
Our solutions are set up in a simple way to support you with your projects: take advantage of the flexibility of on-demand resources to scale up from small projects to large-scale deployments, or from simple data analytics all the way through to deep learning deployments.
We have an active ecosystem of partners to engage with and grow your solution and business, within which OVHcloud act as a facilitator:
- Access to OVHcloud experts
- Access to OVHcloud business and technology partners
- Access to accelerators, VCs and additional experts
We also use OVHcloud’s worldwide awareness to give startups visibility at international events (Gitex, Vivatech, Slush, Web Summit, etc.) or for local events such as meetups or webinars during which we showcase our startups’ solutions.
As an example, at the end of May, we took part for the second time in a row in the Gitex Morocco event with our partner Maroc Datacenter. This has enabled us to talk to our startups and give them visibility. On top of that, this event was an opportunity for us to announce the first opening of a Local Zone on the African continent, with operations scheduled to begin in Rabat in the coming months.
This new Local Zone offers African customers new opportunities to access the Group’s Public Cloud services, with reduced latency and local data hosting.
This news demonstrates OVHcloud’s commitment in Africa to offer trusted cloud solutions and accelerate its support to African startups.
So why not come and give the OVHcloud Startup Program a try? If you need a trusted cloud with an open environment that guarantees autonomy for users, as well as full control over your own data, the simplest way to start benefiting from the Startup Program is to apply on our website here.
If you have any questions, contact Christopher Apédo-Amah, Startup Program Manager Africa for OVHcloud at africa-me-startup@ovh.com.
