ICYMI: AWS Launches $30M Impact Accelerator, Startup Lofts Reopen, Mistakes Founders Make (and How to Avoid Them), and More

Each month, the AWS Startups blog is packed with announcements, resources, stories, and videos. Let’s get caught up on anything that you might have missed. Then, head to Twitter and LinkedIn to share your reactions and tell us what you’d like to read.

Announcements

AWS Launches $30M Impact Accelerator for Underrepresented Founders

The newly-announced program will provide up to $225,000 in cash and credits for early stage startups led by Black, women, Latino, and LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs, as well as training, mentoring, and technical guidance. Plus, hear from three founders about what access to capital and resources means for the next generation.

From the news:

• SiliconANGLE: Amazon Launches First AWS Impact Accelerator for Black Founders
• Black Enterprise: Amazon Web Services Kicks Off $30 Million Accelerator for Underrepresented Business Owners, Including Black Founders
• InfoWorld: AWS Launches $30M Impact Accelerator for Minority-Led Startups

Welcome Back to the San Francisco AWS Startup Loft

The Startups team announced the re-opening of the San Francisco AWS Startup Loft for April 18, 2022. Share the news with your network and with any burgeoning startups looking for support. The SF AWS Startup Loft is open to all startups building on-cloud and is a free benefit for existing AWS Activate members.

Ship Your MVP in Hours with AWS Amplify Studio

AWS Amplify is excited to announce the launch of Amplify Studios, a visual interface to that lets developers go from a Figma design to a feature-rich, full-stack app in hours.

Resources

SERIES: Ten Mistakes Founders Make on AWS, and How to Avoid Them

We want to help you stay focused on your customers and building features for their products, so our Solutions Architects put together a list of the most common mistakes they see founders make on AWS. Each mistake is paired with advice on how you can avoid them to save time and money.

• Why Every Startup Should Set Up a Budget — and How AWS Budgets Makes It Easy
• Leveraging AWS Business Support as a Startup
• Founder Security Fundamentals – Improved Security with Identity and Access Management
• Why Early Stage Startups Need to Use Multi-factor Authentication
• Should Startups Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
• When Should Startups Use a Managed Service?
• How Setting Up IAM Users and IAM Roles Can Help Keep Your Startup Secure
• To Deliver Rich Content, Startups Need the Right Infrastructure
• Extend Your Runway by Turning Off AWS Resources When Not in Use
• The Case for Purpose-Built Databases

Startup Spotlights

Datagen Creates High-Fidelity Synthetic Data to Address Human-Centric Problems

When Gil Elbaz and Ofir Zuk founded Datagen in 2018, it was with the purpose of re-inventing the broken process of how clients obtain data for computer vision network training. More specifically, they wanted to bring data simulation to every computer vision team in a continuous and scalable way.

How Navina Leverages the Full AWS Toolkit to Make Data Work for Doctors and Patients

Founded in 2018, Navina is leveraging the full AWS toolkit to improve the human-to-human interactions at the heart of healthcare. “[The result is] a better physician experience,” says Anne Amario, Navina VP of Marketing, as well as “better diagnosis and care.” Learn how Navina is driving better patient outcomes and preserving physicians’ revenues.

Using AWS to Build Tools That Will Design Tomorrow’s Green Infrastructure

Web application Optioneer employs multiple AWS services and is updated daily thanks to its continuous deployment pipeline. However, as it grew in complexity, the team at Continuum Industries realized they needed to overhaul their deployment process to deliver more reliable updates to production, faster. That is when the AWS startup team stepped up to provide additional support.

Lokavant Creates a Paradigm Shift in Clinical Trial Intelligence with AWS

Lokavant is a Clinical Trial Intelligence company with the mission to decrease the time and cost of developing drugs by mitigating operational risk. When developing their products and platform they partner to provide the best environment for building and deploying, without bogging down the business with unnecessary costs and effort. Lokavant quickly realized that AWS could help provide the solutions that they urgently needed.

Featured Videos

How AWS Empowered BlockFi to Scale at Their Own Pace

BlockFi, a crypto services platform operating in the fintech space, offers financial products to retail and institutional investors. After rapidly growing from 200 to 1,000 employees during the pandemic, the company knew they needed a solid infrastructure that would allow them to scale quickly and safely.

Dremio Is Transforming How Companies Analyze Their Data on AWS

Dremio, a SQL lakehouse platform, is a service that enables companies to query the data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to get fast results and power live dashboards directly on their lake.

DayTwo Is Using Data Analytics from the Gut Microbiome to Further Healthcare

Data infrastructure relies on a variety of data analytics tools and machine-learning capabilities, so DayTwo turned to several of the AWS ecosystem services. Specifically, they are utilizing AWS Lake Formation and AWS Deep Learning Containers in order to analyze large outputs. They’re also relying on Amazon SageMaker to manage all of their machine-learning and AI capabilities.