AWS Startups Blog

With booming growth and a focus on innovation, the fintech industry is clearly poised to see significant advancements in the near future. As customers—especially younger generations—gravitate toward the ease and efficiency of mobile options to satisfy their financial needs, even large institutions have begun adapting to meet demand by offering digital documentation and app-based banking functionality. Still, no one in the industry would argue that many of the nimblest new products come from the startup world, where forward-thinkers can build from the ground up. 8 Securities, a mobile-only investment service based in Hong Kong, is one such company looking to change the paradigm of finance.

At face value, Dollar Shave Club looks like a fairly simple service. Users come to the site and are able to search through various grooming products, such as shower gels, toothpastes, or, of course, razors. The simplicity and ease of navigation is no mistake, however, with the DSC engineering team focusing heavily on creating a seamless user experience that showcases the company’s affordable products.

Founded in 2017, Lime is an urban transportation company that provides smart bikes and scooters for consumers to travel around cities. The startup has seen some dramatic growth since launching, having logged over 12 million rides across the US, Europe, and Oceania. This explosion in popularity and rapid expansion comes with some unique technical challenges, however, especially around data. Check out the above video featuring Xiuming Chen, Engineering Manager of Infrastructure at Lime, to learn about how his team leverages AWS to solve for such problems.

“With more and more businesses online, and more and more tools to attack digital storefronts and web apps, why would a criminal perform a physical break-in or theft?” says Ghin Khoo, Sales Manager at Kasada, an Australian cybersecurity company focused on the emerging Bot Risk Management space. “The number of break-in attempts can be massively scaled via new technology, and the chances of getting caught are much lower.  Criminals know it’s economically viable and lucrative to perform automated online attacks.”

As some economies develop, small businesses that also develop and grow can sometimes be left out in the rain when searching for capital. Banks frequently look for collateral to be posted with loans, which can be difficult for smaller companies. This gap in offering is exactly where many startups are flourishing via assessing companies credit statuses through atypical methods or data, and providing financing to the previously underserved. Konfío, a fintech startup founded in 2013, does just that for micro-businesses throughout Latin America.

Panoply is a smart data warehouse for BI and basically layers machine learning algorithms on top of Amazon Redshift.

By now, it’s commonplace for banks to claim the mantle of “tech company.” But for OakNorth, tech and banking truly go hand-in-hand. Its data and technology platform, OakNorth Analytical Intelligence (ONAI), allows it to do balance sheet lending via OakNorth Bank in the UK, profitably originating over £2 billion without a single default or late payment since its launch in September 2015. Outside the UK, it licences its ONAI platform to banks and other lenders, operating as a PaaS business on the strength of its unique tech.

Felix Perdana, Software Engineering Manager at Traveloka, talks about working for a “unicorn” startup based out of Indonesia, how engineers are different from programmers, and key technical lessons he has learned. He also shares how the company uses AWS to maintain visibility into (and behind) its systems.

As an SAP Operations Manager you need to ensure that IT systems are operating at maximum efficiency and in a Known Good State. As a result, you are under constant pressure to meet service level targets and performance metrics, such as Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR). In this article, I address the three most important next practices for addressing this challenge.

The cars used during Formula 1 races are incredibly advanced, many housing up to 120 sensors creating three gigabytes of data within a single race. To better leverage all of this data, Formula 1 has partnered with AWS to move the vast majority of its infrastructure to the cloud from on-premise solutions. Check out the above interview with Adrian Cockroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, to learn more.