Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., today announced $230 million in funding to help startups around the world accelerate the development of generative AI applications. This funding will provide startups, especially those in the early stages, with AWS credits, mentorship, and education to accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. A portion of this new funding will support the second round of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a program that provides hands-on expertise and up to $1 million in credits to the top 80 early-stage startups that are using generative AI to solve complex challenges. Applications for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator open today and will be accepted through July 19.
For over 18 years, AWS has helped more startups build, launch, and scale their businesses than any other cloud provider, and it's no coincidence that 96% of AI/ML unicorns run on AWS. With this new commitment, AWS is empowering startups to launch and scale world-class businesses, providing the building blocks they need to enable new AI applications that impact every aspect of how the world learns, connects, and operates.
Matt Wood, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Products, AWS
Startups can use AWS credits to access AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, energy-efficient AI chips that deliver high performance at low cost. These credits can also be used on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that helps companies build and train their own FMs, and to access models and tools to easily and securely build generative AI applications through Amazon Bedrock.
AWS Generative AI Accelerator will identify top early-stage startups using generative AI to solve complex challenges in sectors such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, business, and climate change. Participants will have access to sessions on ML performance enhancements, stack optimization, and go-to-market strategies. The 10-week program will match participants with both business and technical mentors based on their industry. Startups will receive up to $1 million in AWS credits each to help them build, train, test, and release their generative AI solutions. They will also have access to industry experts, technologies, and technical sessions from NVIDIA, the program's presenting partner, and will be invited to participate in the NVIDIA Inception program, designed to incubate cutting-edge startups.
AWS will announce the startups selected for the second batch on Sept. 10, and the program will launch with in-person sessions at Amazon's Seattle campus on Oct. 1. All 80 participating startups will be invited to re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas in December to present their solutions to potential investors, customers, partners, and AWS leaders.
AWS played a key role in helping us scale our Generative AI platform to meet exponentially growing demand from our global user community. AWS' robust Generative AI infrastructure reduced our inference costs by 60% and accelerated our language model inference speed by up to 35%. The accelerator was also a great experience for us. The business and technical mentorship we received and the connections we made played a key role in shaping our product and strategy.
Jachin Bhasme, Co-founder and COO, Leonardo.AI
“AWS has the right combination of technology, partner network, and potential customers in the life sciences space to support our vision of building next-generation AI models for drug discovery. Participating in the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program provided us with a unique opportunity to join this community and leverage AWS' infrastructure and expertise in scaling model training and development.”
Dr. Nima Alidousto, CEO and Co-Founder, Vevo Therapeutics
