AWS Startups Blog

Initially released on February 19, 1990, Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the doyen of design. However, after nearly 30 years, Photoshop’s licensing model is being challenged by several startups looking to democratize the design industry and make it easier for all people, and not just professionals, to create. One such startup is San Francisco-based Figma. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, the open design platform—which just raised a $25 million Series B—features a cloud-based screen design tool, which helps teams achieve a shared understanding around design without worrying about syncing, exporting or installing software. We recently caught up with Field to talk about how the cloud has made life easier for designers.

Looking to democratize design for everyone, Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2014 to reimagine design for the Internet age.

Andiamo aims to bring 3-D scanned and printed orthotics to families and children in the UK—and soon, the world. What the London-based startup, through 3-D scanning and printing, has the potential to solve for is what every great new technology brings to the party: a better, faster, and cheaper approach.

Every day here at GIPHY, we have GIFs on GIFs on GIFs uploaded to our platform. In fact, we serve over three billion GIFs a day (that’s a lot of dancing cats!) to over 300 million daily active users. Every upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a lot to manage. Using database services like MySQL and DynamoDB, we’re able to organize this heavy amount of data in a high-performing way.

After selling his first startup to Salesforce when he was 21, Howie Liu could have focused his efforts on any number of subjects. Instead, he decided start Airtable, a collaboration platform that essentially modernizes one of the least sexy products around: spreadsheets.

What’s more fun than an all-night hackathon in Vegas? Why, a Vegas hackathon involving self-driving cars, of course. During AWS’s 2017 re:Invent conference, 25 teams were given kits to build an autonomous car that could learn how to drive around a track on its own.

SeatGeek data scientists Andy Enkeboll and Tiffany Hu explain how they used AWS to help make their data more easily accessible for both themselves and the larger SeatGeek team.

DataDome Duo Benjamin Fabre and Benjamin Barrier chat about bot detection, risk detection, and being three-time serial entrepreneurs.

How open source can be a resource for startups.

As the co-creator, with Cornell Tech Professor Serge Belongie, of the AI and machine learning-based visual classification system Visipedia, Pietro Perona has spent the past seven years working on a “switchboard” that lets anyone, everywhere ask questions and immediately obtain an answer.