AWS Ignites Startup Innovation with Accelerators

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Today’s Highlights:

• 🖥️AWS Ignites Startup Innovation with Accelerators👩‍💻

• 💰Identity Management Startup Veza Raises $15M💸

AWS Creates Startup Accelerators to Mold Pioneering Mavericks

Building a startup is a tough feat more and more professionals are pursuing nowadays. Aside from having to come up with innovative and impactful ideas and products in a world already filled with them, you have to figure out how to not only launch your startup but to ensure it can grow.

From making sure that your startup follows necessary legal dealings to securing funding and building a customer base, there are an abundance of steps you have to follow. Solid business and marketing plans are also vital for a startup, and all these aspects take massive agility and dedication.

It is not at all a sign of weakness or lack of ability to require a little assistance when building your startup, and this is exactly what startup incubators* and accelerators* offer. Accelerators like Y Combinator, TechStars, and StartX assist professionals by providing them the resources needed to further grow their startups, with funding opportunities and mentorship, for example.

Aside from pure accelerators, there also exist companies like Amazon, who, though mostly known for their services in retail, have also utilized its resources to build accelerators, as they’ve done with their cloud computing services Amazon Web Services (AWS).

After years of supporting startups with its various accelerator options, AWS has recently launched an accelerator specifically built for early-stage, pre-seed startups named AWS Build.

*Incubators: Collaborative programs, usually physically located in one central workplace, designed to help early-stage startups by providing workspace, seed funding, mentoring, and training.

*Accelerators: Mentor-based business programs that support startups through guidance, support, and limited funding, often in exchange for equity.

History of Accelerating

AWS has equipped thousands of startup founders with knowledge and expertise on how to build and grow their companies and provided them with AWS developer credits, also known as Activate credits.

AWS mainly focused on growth-stage startups over the years, with global accelerators like Healthcare Accelerator, Defense Accelerator, Sustainable Cities Accelerator, and Space Accelerator. After growing aware of the help it could provide to early-stage startups using its resources, AWS then built accelerators for early-stage global startups like the AWS Generative AI and the Startup Loft Accelerator, an accelerator made specifically for startups in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

In addition to all that, AWS has also managed to assist 70 startups with an accelerator specifically built for underrepresented Black, Latino, and female entrepreneurs in the US named Impact Accelerator.

Despite all the assistance they’ve managed to provide over the years, the company still often faced the issue of having to reject applications from early-stage startup founders as they couldn’t fulfill the requirements needed for AWS programs. According to the head of AWS’ startup programs, Denise Quashie, AWS had to reject about 48% of early-stage startups because they were simply too early.

This issue became one of the reasons why AWS decided to pursue Build Accelerator. AWS feels as though its cloud-based services could play a monumental role in pre-seed startups that will eventually become impactful and solve complex problems the world faces.

Innovation and Inspiration

This brand-new program runs for 10 weeks, starting on October 9, and will run through December 15, 2023. Founders will be given technical and business guidance via online streaming talks provided by AWS solutions architecture experts and outsiders.

The program also has lessons, Q&A discussions and open forums, and community events. The goal of these activities is so every startup participating would be able to launch a minimum viable product when the program ends. To aid founders in developing their products and services, whether software or hardware, AWS will provide up to $2,000 in AWS cloud credits.

Once the program ends, AWS will invite participating founders into the AWS Build Community, a global virtual community that is filled with peers and technical experts. This way, as they grow, every startup will still be able to learn from, collaborate with, and simply inspire each other. Neither AWS nor Amazon will be taking any equity stake in the startups that participate in the Build program.

AWS believes that the journey of a startup founder can be lonely, especially so early on. By joining a tight-knit community filled with equally creative people, founders will have a network to turn to for advice and strategies.

By creating a fully virtual educational and informational program and providing resources for entrepreneurs all around the world, AWS hopes to foster influential inspiration and innovation for all, together.

Funding News

Identity Management Platform Veza Raises $15M

Veza is a data security platform founded in 2020 by Maohua Lu, Rob Whitcher, and CEO Tarun Thakur. With its software, the startup secures identity access across apps, data systems, and cloud infrastructure in the age of data breaches, which, according to IBM’s study, costs organizations $4.45 million on average.

Recently, Veza raised $15 million in a funding round led by Capital One Ventures and ServiceNow. Veza plans to develop its products further to expand its sales capacity. By doing so, Veza hopes that it could continue to help companies enforce cybersecurity policies.

Veza’s software can be used to monitor violations and risky permissions in real-time, automatically blocking and revoking any form of unauthorized access. Totaling to funds of $125 million, Veza hopes to continue with its mission of creating a future with automated data security and full access control.

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