Earlier this year, Deep Instinct was selected out of hundreds of AI and deep learning startups to compete in NVIDIA’s Inception AI startup competition to find the best AI startups. The Inception Awards ceremony took place Wednesday in Silicon Valley at the GPU Technology Conference, the premier AI event with more than 7,000 industry leaders, media, and investors in attendance.

This was the inaugural year of NVIDIA’s Inception Awards, which recognized startups in three categories – Hottest Emerging, Most Disruptive, and Social Innovation. Winners received significant cash prizes and graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware to further accelerate their activities. Emerging out of stealth mode in November 2015, Deep Instinct’s patent-pending application of deep learning to cybersecurity results in cutting-edge capabilities of unmatched accurate detection and real-time prevention. Leveraging the capabilities associated with deep learning, Deep Instinct provides instinctive protection on any device, platform, and operating system. Zero-day and APT attacks are immediately detected and blocked before any harm can happen to the enterprise’s endpoints, servers, and mobile devices.

“Deep Instinct relies on end-to-end deep learning for all its advanced malware detection and prevention capabilities. The deep neural network is trained on hundreds of millions of malicious and legitimate files. To handle such large-scale training, Deep Instinct developed its proprietary deep learning infrastructure directly on NVIDIA’s GPU machines,” said Dr. Eli David, CTO of Deep Instinct. “The powerful capabilities of NVIDIA GPUs enable us to perform our training at a substantially faster speed compared to CPUs: while training the Deep Instinct brain on NVIDIA’s GPUs takes a little over a single day of training, the same task on CPUs would take more than three months!” “We are thrilled to be recognized by NVIDIA for what we believe is a groundbreaking application of GPUs,” said Guy Caspi, CEO of Deep Instinct. “Being able to leverage powerful technological capabilities to apply deep learning to cybersecurity empowers enterprises with unprecedented, real-time protection from the next unexpected attack.”