AWS Invests $230M in Generative AI Startups and Enhances Accelerator Program for Innovation

AWS has announced a substantial investment of $230 million to bolster early-stage startups focused on developing generative AI applications. This initiative expands the Generative AI Accelerator program, designed to provide emerging companies with essential financial resources and cloud service credits. Over the course of this 10-week program, up to 80 startups will each receive as much as $1 million in AWS cloud credits, streamlining their access to advanced infrastructure and AI training tools.

Startups interested in participating must submit applications by the deadline of July 19. The program offers credits that can be utilized for a variety of AWS infrastructure solutions, including high-performance hardware like the custom Trainium and Inferentia2 chips specifically designed for efficient AI model training. Participants will also benefit from AWS services like SageMaker, which aids users in building and training foundation models, and Bedrock, a fully managed service granting access to pre-existing models from leading AI developers such as Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral via API.

Beyond financial support, the program emphasizes mentorship, pairing startups with AWS experts who can guide them in enhancing machine learning performance, optimizing technical stacks, and refining go-to-market strategies. Additionally, participating startups will gain insights from program partner Nvidia, leveraging its extensive expertise and tools.

One of the exciting opportunities within this program is the chance for startups to showcase their innovative solutions at the prestigious AWS re:Invent conference scheduled for December in Las Vegas. The inaugural cohort of the Generative AI Accelerator has already demonstrated substantial success; for instance, Leonardo.AI reduced inference costs by 60% and accelerated language model inference speed by 35% through AWS resources.

Jachin Bhasme, co-founder and COO of Leonardo.AI, remarked on the impact of AWS, stating, “AWS has been instrumental in enabling us to scale our generative AI platform to meet the rapidly growing demand from our global user community.” Another standout participant, Vevo Therapeutics, successfully utilized AWS to create AI models for drug discovery. CEO and co-founder Nima Alidoust noted, “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.”

With over 18 years of experience in empowering startups, AWS has a proven track record in helping businesses launch and scale. Matt Wood, AWS’s Vice President for AI Products, highlighted this achievement, stating, “It’s no coincidence that 96% of all AI/machine learning unicorns run on AWS.” With the expansion of the Generative AI Accelerator program, AWS aims to equip startups with the foundational elements needed to launch transformative AI applications that will reshape how the world learns, connects, and conducts business.