A tiny UK company is showing how easy it is to get an Nvidia halo effect

RedCloud Holdings, which operates a business-to-business platform for retailers, finished the day up 63% on Wednesday after revealing that “it has joined the NVIDIA Connect program as part of its mission to deliver a new operating system for global trade.”

RedCloud is fairly small, with a market cap under $70 million heading into yesterday’s session.

So what is the Nvidia Connect program, you might ask? Sounds fancy. And official. Right?

The chip designer’s website describes it as “a free program that helps software development companies and service providers shorten time to market through tailored development resources, technical training and guidance, and preferred pricing on NVIDIA technologies.”

In other words, companies learn how to be more effective users (read: customers!) of Nvidia’s products and technology. That’s it! RedCloud is hardly the first company to see a massive spike upon revealing its membership in this club; Firefly Neuroscience, PainReform, Stereotaxis, and Ekso Bionics all enjoyed huge jumps the day they announced that they joined, again, a free program that teaches companies how to spend more money on Nvidia.

However, the vast majority of these jumps were short-lived, as this brutal chart shows.

Still, Jorge Guerrero, assistant vice president of product at RedCloud, made it sound like a pretty big deal in the company’s press release: “This program provides us with access to NVIDIA’s ecosystem of AI tools and expertise, which we expect to be instrumental in building powerful AI-native infrastructure to enable intelligent trade of FMCG products across global supply chains.”

The Takeaway

A cynic might argue that the requirements of joining the Nvidia Connect program are only slightly more onerous than securing a Discover credit card: the applying organization “must provide at least two contacts with corporate emails, maintain a working website, be officially incorporated, and accept the program’s terms and conditions” to be eligible, per Nvidia. For a thing with no application or membership fees, at the very least it’s a pretty obvious way to borrow some (brief) valor from Nvidia.