Made in New York, powered by AWS

Funding, diversity, creativity, talent. New York City has it all. The city’s fast pace and dynamism is the ideal match for the velocity of early-stage businesses, and coupled with a strong VC funding market, means America’s cultural capital is home to a thriving startup scene.

AWS has long championed founders in the city, with the annual AWS Summit New York, spotlighting startups building solutions that are revolutionizing industries and empowering businesses. That energy extends far beyond the event itself and into the daily realities of building and scaling in the city. Here, five trailblazing founders who call NYC home, discuss their experiences of working with AWS, the need for speed, and how the city shapes the startup mindset.

Building firm foundations in New York

Most of our founders have been building on AWS from day one, relying on solutions and broader support dedicated to startups. “Our company has been with AWS from the beginning,” explains Matt Gerber, Co-founder and Chief Business Offer of Order.co, a company working to simplify purchasing and payments. “We took Amazon's core mission of being Earth's most customer-centric company to heart, and we've taken advantage of that at every turn.” For companies like Order.co that means support with design architecture for infrastructure and in-person assistance to get up and running with AWS solutions as quickly as possible.

Faster growth is an aim for almost all founders. In New York’s startup scene, speed equals competitive advantage. “Speed to us is really the lifeblood of our business,” says Kushal Byatnal, CEO and Co-founder of Extend, an AI document processing specialist. “It is the only advantage that startups really have, and what you try to live and breathe every single day.” For Extend—and many startups like it—that means hiring and retaining talent, working on sprint cycles, and shipping features. Keeping up with the competition is tough, but doing so in the AI era is especially challenging. “Things change every single day, and the market is constantly shifting underneath you,” says Byatnal.

By constantly developing new solutions, as well as offering support and personalized guidance, AWS is providing the firm foundation needed to help startups navigate the AI era and capitalize on it, at speed. For Extend, that means using an array of AWS infrastructure and services, meaning “we don't have to worry too much about how we are we going to scale up when we onboard customers,” Byatnal continues. “We can really rely on AWS as a partner to help us get there quickly and spend all of our engineering resources and time on just building the best product as fast as we can.”

Hebbia, meanwhile, deploys all its infrastructure on AWS and relies on AWS managed services to deliver low-latency, highly scalable services for the end user of its AI finance platform. The collaboration has also enabled it to add capacity to large language models quickly and easily, which is “really important to a generative AI business” like Hebbia, explains Founder and CEO, George Volker.  “As we've gotten bigger, as we've scaled, and as the generative AI wave has kind of taken hold, our partnership has only grown.”

Keeping pace with AI

Similarly, speedy and successful scaling for Air is heavily influenced by one factor: “I'd be ignorant to suggest that the biggest evolution was anything other than AI,” says Shane Hegde, CEO and Co-founder of the digital asset management platform. Fortunately, he continues, “there are newer, progressive technologies that have emerged in the last few years that are allowing companies like ours to do more and more powerful things on behalf of our customers.” AWS is a critical cloud provider for the startup, which is utilizing everything from Amazon ECS for container orchestration, to AWS Lambda for serverless computing, AWS Batch for compute and Amazon S3 for storage.

Air is also harnessing AI, that all-important driver of growth, through Amazon Bedrock for data automation, as well as Amazon Bedrock Agents in a new product release. A robust infrastructure foundation, plus tools and services that enable evolution and agility, are enabling Air to achieve a perfect balance between speed and security. “The beauty of the AWS suite is it allows us to operate at a really high developer velocity while also staying compliant to the needs, both on the security side and the operational side, of our customers,” says Hegde.

Investing in growth

Others have benefitted from programs like AWS Activate, gaining access to resources, training, technical support, and AWS Activate Credits, to build better and scale faster. These include Adaptive ML, a startup helping enterprises deploy generative AI, which used US $100,000 in Credits to power faster growth at lower cost. “We were able to bootstrap early on to get started very quickly and spin up a lot of instances without having to worry too much about the cost of things,” says Daniel Hesslow, Co-founder of Adaptive ML.

As a result, and in additional to a listing on AWS Marketplace, Hesslow continues, “we're starting to see a good customer traction now over the last few years, and now we're planning to grow by another three x in the next two years or so.” Order.co also used Activate Credits to “prototype and test things, and scale in different ways,” says Order.co’s Gerber, giving the startup “a competitive advantage in being first to market on things that you otherwise couldn’t do.”

Hiring and hustle

Financial support is critical for startups, which often have to balance a need for speed with tight budgets. However, many are also operating with lean team too, which makes the additional human support offered through a partnership with AWS equally important. When choosing a partner, “it was really people first,” says Gerber. “When we saw the people who worked at Amazon Business and they recommended the people who worked at AWS, it was absolutely a no brainer.”

A people-first mentally to growth has also shaped many founders’ decisions to build a business in New York. The choice has been a “really impactful” one for Extend. “Hiring and recruiting is an undersold secret. You can pull people into New York and get some really great talent that way,” says Byatnal. Similarly, Hebbier’s Volker, a New York native, says the city has “hustle” and “a group of people, of really diverse individuals, that make something happen.”

Hiring people is one part of building and growing a startup; the other is marketing and selling to them. Again, New York offers an advantage here. Adaptive ML started out in Amsterdam before moving to Paris and more recently settling in New York, in order to be closer its customers whilst still maintaining a “strategic hub” across the pond in Europe, says Hesslow. Similarly, as “the central hub” for “all of finance, all of professional services,” the city was also the natural choice for Hebbier, bringing it to closer to its customers in the finance sector.

Speed and the city

Like any great city, New York is more than the sum of its parts. Yes, it has a thriving startup scene and a steady stream of VC investment. It has the talent and it has networking opportunities. It’s got enterprises looking to make their operations smoother and their businesses better by adopting the next big thing in tech. But it also has an energy and culture that aligns with the entrepreneurial verve of many founders looking to scale and innovate. “New York is a very fast-moving place, and it matches the velocity of startups,” says Hesslow.

For all of the founders we spoke with, AWS is a critical partner. Collaboration reduces many of the frictions and costs startups experience on their journeys, with long-term commitments and a level of flexibility helping them maintain momentum and keep pace with the industry, and the city. Partnering with AWS in New York, concludes Hegde, “is not only about the economic value today, but what we can really build together” for the future.

Thinking about the next step for your startup? AWS Activate helps founders at every stage of growth, providing tools, resources, and expertise to support faster building. Startups can also receive up to US $100,000 in AWS Activate Credits to offset costs on AWS services, including infrastructure, data, and leading AI and ML models. More than 350,000 startups around the globe have joined the program since its inception in 2013. Interested in finding out more? Join AWS Activate today.