AWS Wants to Back Generative AI Startups

AWS has launched a Generative AI Accelerator program to nurture 10 startups by offering them business and technical training as well as mentorship.

The chosen few will receive up to $300,000 in AWS credits to help them build their products and services on AWS’ stack. Participants will also be invited to demonstrate their tech at AWS Startup Lofts in San Francisco.

Startups have until April 17 to apply. Those interested should have a minimal viable product already developed and “some traction with customers,” according to AWS.

While the program is open to all startups, the cloud provider said those already building on its systems will “receive the most benefit” from its solutions team.

The program has no limitations around use cases — with AWS saying it wants to “empower companies applying generative AI to solutions from legal and marketing, to software engineering, green energy and life sciences, including drug discovery.”

“Generative AI is an incredibly exciting field that has the potential to revolutionize many industries,” said Howard Wright, vice president and global head of startups at AWS. “Tech startups will play an important role in bringing this technology into the mainstream.”

AWS is already working with a handful of generative AI startups in research, including Midjourney and Gen-2 maker Runway, and Stable Diffusion developer Stability AI. In return, they will use AWS as their preferred cloud provider and its suite of tools such as SageMaker.