AWS Startups Blog

We may be nearing the end of the 2018 but there are no signs of slowing down for the AWS Lofts, located in New York and San Francisco. The AWS Lofts host Architecture Weeks, or a series of technical sessions that are either single or multi-day events. These events are completely free of charge for attendees and are focused on a specific solution or service, such as Security or Machine Learning.

gridX co-founders Andy Booke and David Balensiefen came up with the idea for their IoT startup, gridX, while travelling in Ecuador, where the stability of the power grid left something to be desired.

In 2007, Kenji Shiomi co-founded Sansan, a company that focuses on providing an alternative contact management solution that uses business cards as its building blocks. Sansan offers both B2B and B2C products and counts over 7,000 corporations as its customers, including the Japanese government. 

Tricella is a digital health start-up that launched in 2014.

When it came time for Fiverr to analyze the data around user behavior on its platform, the freelance services website did what many modern businesses do in terms of recruiting the right tool for the task: they engaged Amazon Web Services’s SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker is an API that enables developers and data scientists to readily build, teach, and position machine learning models to serve any need and at any scale.

Lelemba Phiri, the Chief Marketing Officer for mobile payment platform Zoona, says many African businesswomen prefer to simply grow their companies to a “subsistent” level, because if their businesses get too big, they are seen as “not being marriage material.”

It’s safe to say that Gen Y and Gen Z are intimately more connected to their peers—and social influencers—than previous generations and are less connected to cold advertising. “Advertising that just pops up? They don’t watch it,” says ReCactus CEO and Founder Bernard Tan.

Nichole Onome Yembra is the CFO of the Lagos, Nigeria-based Venture Garden Group and the managing partner for Greenhouse Capital, VGG’s investment arm.

To reinvent insurance for the age of digital, George Kesselman founded Anapi, which provides a set of API-first technology tools that function behind the scenes of any digital platform to seamlessly bring in relevant protection for their customers.

During a recent founders panel at the AWS Loft San Francisco, four founders shared hard-won insights on startup culture, how they’ve evolved as leaders, launching versus scaling, growth strategies, and the perennial pursuit of the elusive concept of work-life balance.