The document summarizes the origins and development of the NanoStreams project, an EU-funded research collaboration aimed at developing low-cost, energy-efficient servers for real-time analytics on streaming data. It describes how the project was initially conceived to address performance challenges in financial trading, brought together experts from across Europe, and was a good fit for an EU call focused on synergies between high-performance and embedded computing. The collaboration involved both universities and companies developing new technologies to enable high performance from small, low-power systems.