AWS Hot Startups – April 2017

Spring is here, the flowers are blooming and Tina Barr is back with more great startups for you to check out!

-Ana

Welcome back to another month of hot AWS-powered startups! Today we have three exciting startups:

• Beekeeper – simplifying employee communication in the workplace.
• Betterment – making investing easier for everyone.
• ClearSlide – a leading sales engagement platform.

Be sure to check out our March hot startups in case you missed them.

Beekeeper (Zurich, Switzerland)
Flavio Pfaffhauser and Christian Grossmann, both graduates of ETH Zurich, were passionate about building a technology that would connect and bring people together. What started as a student’s social community soon turned into Beekeeper – a communication platform for the workplace that allows employees to interact wherever they are. As Flavio and Christian learned how to build a social platform that engaged people properly, businesses began requesting a platform that could be adapted to their specific processes and needs. The platform started with the concept of helping people feel as if they are sitting right next to each other, whether they’re at a desk or in the field. Founded in 2012, Beekeeper is focused on improving information sharing, communication and peer collaboration, and the company strongly believes that listening to employees is crucial for organizations.

The “Mobile First, Desktop Friendly” platform has a simple and intuitive interface that easily integrates multiple operating systems into one ecosystem. The interface can be styled and customized to match a company’s brand and identity. Employees can connect with their colleagues anytime and anywhere with private and group chats, video and file sharing, and feedback surveys. With Beekeeper’s analytical dashboard leadership teams can identify trending topics of discussion and track employee engagement and app usage in real-time. Beekeeper is currently connecting users in 137 countries across industries including hospitality, construction, transportation, and more.

Beekeeper likes using AWS because it allows their engineers to focus on the things that really matter; solving customer issues. The company builds its infrastructure using services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS, all of which allow the technical teams to offload administrative tasks. Amazon Elastic Transcoder and Amazon QuickSight are used to build analytical dashboards and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing.

Check out the Beekeeper blog to keep up with their latest news!

Betterment (New York, NY)
Betterment is on a mission to make investing easier and more accessible for everyone, no matter their financial goal. In 2008, Jon Stein founded Betterment with the intent to reinvent the industry and save future investors from making the same common mistakes he had been making. At that time, most people only had a couple of options when it came to investing their money – either do it yourself or hire another person to do it for you. Unfortunately, financial advisors are sometimes paid to recommend certain investments even if it’s not what is best for their clients. Betterment only chooses investments that are in their customer’s best interest and align with their financial goals. Today, they are the largest, independent online investment advisor managing more than $8 billion in assets for over 240,000 customers.

Betterment uses technology to make investing easier and more efficient, while also helping to increase after-tax returns. They offer a wide range of financial planning services that are personalized to their customer’s life goals. To start an investment plan, customers can input their age, retirement status, and annual income and Betterment will recommend how much money to invest and which type of account is the right choice. They will invest and manage it in a way that many traditional investment services can’t at a lower cost.

The engineers at Betterment are constantly working to build industry-changing technology as quickly as possible to help customers maximize their money. AWS gives Betterment the flexibility to easily provision infrastructure and offload functions to various services that once required entire teams to manage. When they first started in the cloud, Betterment was using standard implementations of Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. Since they’ve gone all in with AWS, they have been leveraging services like Amazon Redshift, AWS Lambda, AWS Database Migration Service, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and more. Today, they are using over 20 AWS services to develop, test, and deploy features and enhancements on a daily basis.

Learn more about Betterment here.

ClearSlide (San Francisco, CA)
ClearSlide is one of today’s leading sales engagement platforms, offering a complete and integrated tool that makes every customer interaction successful. Since their founding in 2009, ClearSlide has looked for ways to improve customer experiences and have developed numerous enablement tools for sales leaders and teams, marketing, customer support teams, and more. The platform puts content, communication channels, and insights at their customer’s fingertips to help drive better decisions and manage opportunities. ClearSlide serves thousands of companies including Comcast, the Sacramento Kings, The Economist, and so far their customers have generated over 750 million minutes of engagement!

ClearSlide offers a solution for all parts of the sales process. For sales leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and sales forecast accuracy. For marketing and sales enablement teams, they guide sellers to the right content, at the right time, in the right context, and provide insight to maximize content ROI. For sales reps, ClearSlide integrates communications, content, and analytics in a single platform experience. Communications can be made across email, in-person or online meetings, web, or social. Today, ClearSlide customers report a 10-20% increase in closed deals, 25% decrease in onboarding time for new reps, and a 50-80% reduction in selling costs.

ClearSlide uses a range of AWS services, but Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS have made the biggest impact on their business. EC2 enables them to easily scale compute capacity, which is critical for a fast-growing startup. It also provides consistency during deployment – from development and integration to staging and production. RDS reduces overhead and allows ClearSlide to scale their database infrastructure. Since AWS takes care of time-consuming database management tasks, ClearSlide sees a reduction in operations costs and can focus on being more strategic with their customers.

Watch this video to learn how LiveIntent reduced sales cycles by 22% using ClearSlide. Get all the latest updates by following them on Twitter!

Thanks for checking out another month of awesome AWS-powered startups!

-Tina