Fall 2018 Hot AWS EdStart Startups: Masters Avenue, Saasyan, Salty Cloud, and SmartGames

EdTechs around the world are creating programs to help revolutionize education. Behind every EdTech is the technology that powers the next generation of learning. The missions may be different, but the need to build solutions that are secure, smart, scalable, and cost-effective remains the same.

From guiding students to the best graduate programs to providing entertaining educational content for young children, EdTechs around the world are using the AWS Cloud. Learn about AWS EdStart’s hottest new members – Masters Avenue, Saasyan, Salty Cloud, and SmartGames.

Masters Avenue: Finding the right master’s degree is an important life decision for most students. Masters Avenue has analyzed the career paths of more than 7.5 million professionals from around the world, all of which hold a degree from one of the world’s top 100 universities. Students benefit from insight into the successful career paths of others, which guides them in making the right decision for their own career. With Masters Avenue, students can find the best programs for their needs.

“Our website is 100% free to use for students and unbiased,” said Dr. Daniel Baade, CEO, Masters Avenue. “Our service requires fast and reliable server capacity all over the world. AWS provides us with an infrastructure that is second to none and helps us to deliver our service all over the world.”

Saasyan: Saasyan provides easy-to-use security tools specifically designed for schools. Through web filter and firewall tools, Saasyan helps Australian K-12 schools ensure student and school cyber welfare and operate more efficiently. Saasyan SaaS products are used by teachers, students, and school administration teams throughout Australia. For example, Saasyan Assure is a reporting solution for schools to track information about what students are searching for and saying online to prevent cyberbullying and promote good digital citizenship.

“AWS allows us to not have to worry about the infrastructure setup, maintenance, and administration, and focus on developing software and delivering value to our clients,” said Greg Margossian, the founder at Saaysan. “It also makes it straightforward for us to scale and to spin up our services in other regions around the world.”

SaltyCloud: SaltyCloud provides information security solutions to higher education and other highly distributed and regulated environments. All products were created in the trenches from the InfoSec Offices at the University of Texas at Austin and Georgia Institute of Technology to address real and acute pain points for higher education security teams. Solutions include the Dorkbot vulnerability search service, which has identified over 25,000 verified vulnerabilities across 500+ universities in 10 countries. Additionally, SaltyCloud’s risk assessment workflow software, ISORA, allows educational institutions to organize and simplify their risk-assessment process from asset classification to distributed question-based security and risk assessments. ISORA enables campuses to efficiently account for assets, conduct campus-wide framework-based assessments (NIST, ISO, CIS), and demonstrate regulatory compliance.

“AWS has been a critical resource to allow us to efficiently scale our business in the U.S. and beyond,” said Andrew Scheifele, PhD and co-founder of SaltyCloud. “The flexibility to align the appropriate infrastructure instance by instance, from small local colleges to entire university systems, allows us to rapidly deploy and onboard new campuses.”

SmartGames: SmartGames produces, licenses, and distributes the world’s leading kids’ intellectual property (IP) to the Greater China market. With top brands like PBS Kids and Touch Press, plus studio facilities in China, SmartGames is able to localize, adapt, package, and produce original kids’ IP. From videos and apps to books and games, everything SmartGames produces and distributes is about kids having fun and loving to learn.

SmartGames has developed a comprehensive predictive analytics cloud-based platform to track and understand how their products are being used, and how their marketing and business development programs are working. As they gain new insights, they are able to focus their product selection on what kids and parents like and need, develop more effective marketing campaigns, and become increasingly smarter about young Chinese families and how they can best serve them.

“AWS runs both our content, app, distribution, operations, and our back-end analytics platform. All of our foreign IP partners also run on AWS, which makes onboarding their IP and systems onto our China platform much easier,” said Carrie Pederson, CEO, SmartGames. “On top of this, the AWS team in Beijing has been helpful both on the technical side (makes our lives much easier!), and on the marketing side with the AWS EdStart program.”

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