Deutsche Telekom has unveiled the first start-ups it is supporting through its participation in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).
The three start-ups have won places at the TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Center (TEAC) in Germany, where they will receive mentoring and collaboration from Deutsche Telekom as well as working space.
They will also gain access to investor contacts, with a group of German investors having conditionally offered €100 million in venture capital funding to support the teams.
One start-up is Airrays, which develops smart antennas with beamforming and tracing capabilities. Also joining the centre is a team from Berlin Institute for Software-Defined Networks (BISDN), which has created an architecture which allows cost-effective scaling of NFV infrastructure by managing data plane workloads.
A third, as yet unnamed company joins from the Belgium-based innovation hub Imec, providing active phased-array antenna technology for the 60GHz spectrum band.
The announcement follows the three companies pitching to a panel of Deutsche Telekom, TIP and Facebook experts on 20 March.
“With the TEAC Germany, we want to make it easier for start-ups to enter the telco market to drive innovation and tackle telco infrastructure challenges in close collaboration with operators,” Deutsche Telekom said in a statement.
The TEAC was launched last year to lower the boundaries to market for start-ups providing innovative infrastructure solutions.
UK operator BT opened its own TEAC in October.
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