AWS Commits $230M to Generative AI Startups, Expands Accelerator Program

AWS has committed $230 million to support early-stage startups building generative AI applications.

The company is expanding its Generative AI Accelerator program that gives emerging startups financial support and AWS credits to use its cloud services.

The 10-week program will provide up to $1 million in cloud credits to 80 early-stage startups. The program is application-only, however, with the deadline for applications July 19.

Startups can use the credits to access AWS infrastructure solutions and hardware to train their AI applications, including its custom Trainium Inferentia2 chips.

The credits can also be spent to access SageMaker, Amazon’s service that allows users to build and train their foundation models and Bedrock, its fully managed service that provides access to existing foundation models from Anthropic, Meta and Mistral through an API.

AWS said it would also provide startups with mentorship from its experts on enhancing machine learning performance, optimizing tech stacks and go-to-market strategies. Startups will also have access to experts, tools and models from program partner Nvidia.

Participating startups will get the chance to showcase their solutions at AWS's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in December.

The first cohort of startups participating in AWS’ accelerator program,  including Leonardo.AI, reduced inference costs by 60% and sped up language model inference by 35% using AWS. 

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“AWS has been instrumental in enabling us to scale our generative AI platform to meet the rapidly growing demand from our global user community,” said Jachin Bhasme, Leonardo.AI’s co-founder and COO.

Another participant, Vevo Therapeutics, leveraged AWS to build AI models for drug discovery.

“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,” said Nima Alidoust, Vevo’s CEO and co-founder.

“For more than 18 years, AWS has helped more startups to build, launch and scale their business than any other cloud provider. It’s no coincidence that 96% of all AI/machine learning unicorns run on AWS,” said Matt Wood, AWS’ vice president for AI products. "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.”