Amazon announces $230m investment to boost AI startups

• Published On: 14 June 2024 at 19:47

Amazon Web Services, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., has announced a $230 million programme to help entrepreneurs globally develop generative AI applications.

This investment aims to help early-stage startups by giving AWS credits, coaching, and education, consequently improving their capabilities in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies.

As part of this commitment, AWS will sponsor the second cohort of its Generative AI Accelerator programme, according to a statement published on its website on Thursday.

This initiative provides hands-on training and up to $1 million in credits to each of the top 80 early-stage firms that use generative AI to solve tough problems.

Applications for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator programme are currently available and will be accepted through July 19, 2024.

Matt Wood, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Products at AWS, stated, "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 and ML unicorns run on 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."

Startups can utilise AWS credits to access AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, which are energy-efficient AI processors that provide great performance at a low cost.

These credits can also be utilised on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that assists businesses in building and training their own FMs, as well as accessing models and tools for easily and securely building generative AI applications via Amazon Bedrock.

The AWS Generative AI Accelerator selects top early-stage entrepreneurs utilising generative AI to solve complex problems in fields like as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, business, and climate change, among others.

Participants will have access to sessions on improving machine learning performance, optimising stacks, and developing go-to-market strategies. The 10-week programme will pair participants with business and technical mentors depending on industry verticals.

Startups will each earn up to $1 million in AWS credits to help them design, train, test, and launch their generative AI products.

They will also receive access to industry experts, technology, and technical workshops from NVIDIA, the program's presenting partner, as well as an invitation to join the NVIDIA Inception programme, which aims to nurture cutting-edge firms.

AWS will reveal the second cohort's selected firms on September 10, and the programme will begin on October 1 with in-person sessions at Amazon's Seattle headquarters.


In December, all 80 participating firms will be invited to attend re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas and present their ideas to potential investors, consumers, partners, and AWS officials.

Jachin Bhasme, Leonardo.AI's co-founder and COO, stated, "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 powerful generative AI infrastructure enabled us to cut inferencing expenses by 60% and increase language model inference speeds by up to 35%.

"The accelerator was also a fantastic experience for us." Bhasme elaborated on how the business and technical guidance we received, as well as the relationships we formed, helped shape our product and approach.

Nima Alidoust, CEO and co-founder of Vevo Therapeutics, stated that "AWS has the right combination of technology, network of partners, and potential customers in the life sciences space, making it the best fit to support our vision of building the next generation of AI models for drug discovery."

"Participating in the AWS Generative AI Accelerator programme provided us with valuable opportunities to tap into this community and to leverage AWS's infrastructure and expertise in scaling model training and development," he said.