AWS is making additional investments worth $230 million in its accelerator program to give a boost to AI startups.

Last year, AWS launched an “accelerator” program for startups working on generative AI. In a press release, it announced a significant expansion of the program. AWS is investing an additional $230 million and expanding the number of startups from 21 to 80.

With the accelerator program, AWS wants to boost startups. According to AWS, startups are crucial for innovation, but their life is not always easy. They often face limited resources and challenges such as ethical and legal complexities.

“Startups solve the problems that established players ignore. In this way, they also challenge us to continue to innovate. But it is not easy to be a start-up today: in the media, it is often idealized with success stories. Many start-ups fail because they cannot set up their network. You can have the best idea, but if nobody knows your brand, nobody will buy your product,” Marius Muller-Minde, who manages startups for AWS, told us a year ago.

Interesting customers

AWS offers startups access to its generative AI services such as Bedrock and Amazon Q, as well as the infrastructure for inference and training. In addition, it also offers free AI training to reduce the shortage of AI skills. In this way, the cloud giant wants to give smaller companies a boost to be competitive in the generative AI landscape.

The cloud provider is not doing this just out of philanthropy. The program ties up-and-coming AI companies to the AWS cloud infrastructure. Large and small AI companies are interesting customers for public hyperscalers, as developing AI models requires a lot of power. Investors also see the potential of generative AI: In 2023, $21.8 billion was invested in generative AI startups, a fourfold increase compared to 2022.

The application process for the AI ​​Accelerator program is open. Companies worldwide can register, regardless of the industry they operate in. A number of startups from the Benelux countries have also been accepted. The Belgian company Relu has developed a dental software plug-in to automate manual tasks.