Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), has unveiled a significant $230 million commitment to support startups globally in the development of generative AI applications. This initiative aims to provide early-stage companies with AWS credits, mentorship, and education to enhance their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.
Empowering Startups with AWS
As part of this commitment, AWS will fund the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator. This program offers hands-on expertise and up to $1 million in credits to each of the top 80 early-stage startups leveraging generative AI to address complex challenges. Applications for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator are open until July 19, and startups can apply here.
“For more than 18 years, AWS has helped more startups build, launch, and scale their businesses than any other cloud provider—it’s no coincidence that 96% of all AI/ML unicorns run on AWS,” said Matt Wood, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Products at AWS. “With this new effort, we will help startups launch and scale world-class businesses, providing the building blocks they need to unleash new AI applications that will impact all facets of how the world learns, connects, and does business.”
Access to Cutting-Edge Technology
Startups selected for the program can utilize AWS credits to access AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, including AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, energy-efficient AI chips designed for high performance at the lowest cost. Additionally, these credits can be used with Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that facilitates the building and training of AI models, and Amazon Bedrock, which offers models and tools for securely building generative AI applications.
AWS Generative AI Accelerator
The AWS Generative AI Accelerator identifies and supports top early-stage startups using generative AI in various sectors, including financial services, healthcare, media, business, and climate change. The 10-week program provides participants with sessions on ML performance enhancement, stack optimization, and go-to-market strategies, matching them with business and technical mentors based on their industry verticals. Each startup will receive up to $1 million in AWS credits to build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions.
Participants will also benefit from industry expertise and technical sessions from NVIDIA, the program’s presenting partner, and will have the opportunity to join the NVIDIA Inception program, designed to nurture cutting-edge startups.
Program Timeline and Showcase
AWS will announce the selected startups for the second cohort on September 10, with the program commencing on October 1 at Amazon’s Seattle campus. All 80 participating startups will be invited to showcase their solutions to potential investors, customers, partners, and AWS leaders in December at re2024 in Las Vegas.
Testimonials from Previous Participants
“AWS has been instrumental in enabling us to scale our generative AI platform to meet the rapidly growing demand from our global user community. Their robust generative AI infrastructure helped us reduce inferencing costs by 60% and accelerate our language model inference speeds by up to 35%,” said Jachin Bhasme, co-founder and COO of Leonardo.AI, a suite of generative AI tools for creators and a participant in the first cohort. “The accelerator was also an incredible experience for us. The business and technical mentorship we received and the connections we made played a crucial role in shaping our product and strategy.”
“AWS has the right combination of technology, network of partners, and potential customers in the life sciences space that made it the best fit to support our vision of building the next generation of AI models for drug discovery,” said Nima Alidoust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Vevo Therapeutics, an AI-driven biotechnology startup. “Participating in the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program provided us with valuable opportunities to tap into this community and to leverage AWS’s infrastructure and expertise in scaling model training and development.”
Learn More
To learn more about the opportunities for generative AI startups choosing AWS and the application process for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, visit AWS Generative AI Accelerator.
