Amazon Web Services (AWS) has aided numerous start-ups in India through its AWS Activate initiative, including AWS credits, technical support and training.
Every start-up has different stages, according to the different phases of its growth journey. In the early stage, when it is building products, the company focuses on helping the start-up minimise undifferentiated work through AWS Activate and the activate console, for more efficiency and optimisation of time and resources, said Pandurang Nayak, Head of Start-up Solutions Architects, AWS India.
$6 billion
“At the early stage, we have a lot of help in terms of credits. AWS Activate is our programme for start-ups across the globe. When start-ups get on Activate, they not only get credits but also get access to the Activate Console, through which they get a lot of pre-made solutions or architectural references that they could use. Since AWS Activate was launched, we have given out about $6 billion worth of credits for start-ups,” said Nayak.
AWS has started AWS Activate credits are now redeemable for third-party models on Amazon Bedrock, our fully-managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies, like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon via a single API.
Start-ups can use their AWS Activate credits to experiment with these and other FMs, along with a broad set of capabilities needed to build responsible generative AI applications with security and privacy. “Our goal is to make it easier for start-ups to evaluate what FMs are more appropriate for their use cases and find the perfect match,” he added.
Apart from this, AWS help start-ups to network with venture capitalists, accelerators, incubators, he added.
For fintech specifically, AWS also provides security, compliance, resilience. On the security side, it has 143 security standards and compliance certifications that are available for start-ups to use, among various different things that they may require. “We have AWS Trusted Advisor, when start-ups switch that on, they can continuously get advice on their particular architecture set-up, and how and what they can improve in their security posture. We also have made investments for start-ups to be able to be really compliant and resilient across things,” said Nayak.
AWS plans to invest $12.7 billion in India by 2030 into local cloud infrastructure. The planned investment will contribute $23.3 billion to India’s GDP by 2030 and support approximately 1,31,700 full time jobs annually at local businesses.