AWS Startups Blog

AWS re:Invent 2021 is back, live and in-person once more. This year, we partnered with AWS Community Hero, Martin Buberl, to create an attendee guide specifically for startup attendees. Martin loves the fast pace of constantly iterating, building, and shipping products that customers love—it keeps him coming back for more. If you love to explore how AWS has changed the game for how rapidly you can turn ideas into products that scale, then his guide is for you. Here are the highlights of what to expect this year.

Think you have a great idea other startups should be using? The Flex Your Skills Contest is your chance to highlight your creativity and ingenuity in integrations in AWS using Step Functions. AWS Step Functions is a low-code visual workflow service used to orchestrate AWS services, automate business processes, and build serverless applications. With the release of AWS SDK Integration in Step Functions, supported integrations for AWS Services in Step Functions have increased from 17 to over 200, and supported AWS API Actions have increased from 46 to over 9,000 making it even simpler to build on AWS.

Founded in 2014, TheLorry has built a logistics platform that connects owners of lorries (similar to a cargo truck), van’s and trucks with customers in need of shipping. From consumers that are looking to clean house and get rid of unwanted goods to enterprises delivering large items like appliances, TheLorry is able to link them up with trucks to efficiently move what is needed.

As a biotechnology company, Stoke Therapeutics is dedicated to addressing the underlying cause of severe diseases with RNA-based medicines. Identifying genomic signatures begins with computational analyses of publicly-available archived data and privately-generated sequencing data. Through AWS, Stoke has quick access to computing resources without the active management of on-prem hardware, enabling them to close the gap between sequencing and interpretation and dedicate more time to science.

.lumen is a Romanian startup working on adding a wearable device to the too-small list of mobility solutions for visually-impaired people. The company’s goal is to pack all the benefits of a guide dog into a headset, making getting around far easier for the millions of blind people who don’t have access to a trained canine.

As the world begins to reconsider international travel, the challenge many governments now face is how to reopen borders to revive their economies, while keeping local communities safe and minimizing health risks. Lengthy lines and unfamiliar screening processes at many airports make it clear that existing systems simply can’t cope with the ‘new normal’ of travelling. Anticipating the need to navigate this incredibly complex and high-stakes landscape, border security experts Travizory developed a world-leading secure SaaS border security and management platform using cutting-edge biometrics, AI and machine learning technologies that enables countries to safely welcome visitors within a matter of weeks.

Communities are vital to the health of individuals and companies, but they can be sprawling, disjointed, and difficult to grasp—especially online. Enter Common Room, which co-founder and Chief Architect Tom Kleinpeter describes as a community-intelligence platform that provides a single view into everything that’s important in your online community, across all the different places it might be happening.

BlackBuck, India’s largest trucking platform, is a digital freight marketplace for shippers and truckers to conveniently discover each other, providing services such as FASTag (an electronic toll collection system), fuel cards, GPS devices, and insurance, among others, to efficiently manage their fleet. BlackBuck’s business and users have grown rapidly from a few thousand users on the platform to more than 1,000,000 users. With the goal of becoming the world’s largest technology-driven trucking platform, maintaining a data-driven approach, as well as strategic product improvements, put Blackbuck well on its way.

Last year, over 600 startups applied from 185 different U.S. universities. Applications were reviewed by representatives from the AWS Startup Business Development team, who then selected 10 teams to compete in the last round. Each startup was paired with a subject matter expert from AWS to help them polish their pitches before their final presentations. Winners received up to $20,000 in cash, up to $100,000 in AWS credits, as well as intros to AWS partners like Techstars and Dorm Room Fund.

In this blog post, Indonesian logistics startup Shipper shares their technology transformation journey and how they’ve grown and supported a couple hundred orders per day back in 2017 up to hundreds of thousands orders per day in recent years with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).