Alex Omenye
Tech giant Amazon Web Services has launched a $230 million fund to support startups worldwide in developing generative AI applications.
The announcement was made on Thursday via a statement on the company’s website.
The fund aims to assist early-stage startups by providing AWS credits, mentorship, and educational resources to enhance their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
A portion of the new fund will be allocated to the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator. This program offers up to $1 million in credits to each of the top 80 early-stage startups leveraging generative AI to address complex challenges. Applications for the program opened on Thursday and will be accepted until July 19, 2024.
The accelerator targets startups tackling issues in sectors such as financial services, healthcare, media and entertainment, business, and climate change. Participants will benefit from sessions on ML performance, stack optimization, and go-to-market strategies.
The 10-week program pairs participants with business and technical mentors based on industry needs. Additionally, startups will gain access to resources and technical sessions from NVIDIA, the presenting partner, and can join the NVIDIA Inception program.
Selected startups for the second cohort will be announced on September 10, with the program commencing on October 1 at Amazon’s Seattle campus.
AWS’s announcement is part of a broader trend of tech giants investing heavily in AI startups. Last year, Visa launched a $100 million initiative to invest in generative AI technologies for commerce and payments. In April, Toyota Ventures announced two $150 million funds for startups in AI, robotics, mobility, cloud, and quantum computing.
In March, Amazon committed $2.75 billion to AI startup Anthropic, the developer behind the AI model Claude, which rivals Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini.
These investments highlight the intense competition among major tech companies like Meta and Apple to integrate generative AI into their products and services, aiming to capture a share of a market projected to exceed $1 trillion in revenue within the next decade.
