AWS Startups Blog

If you’re an entrepreneur with a great idea or a burgeoning startup looking for support, we invite you to immerse yourself in this innovative space and its thriving community at 525 Market Street. The SF AWS Startup Loft is open to all startups building on-cloud and is a free benefit for existing AWS Activate customers.

BlockFi, a crypto services platform operating in the fintech space, offers financial products to retail and institutional investors. After rapidly growing from 200 to 1,000 employees during the pandemic, the company knew they needed a solid infrastructure that would allow them to scale quickly and safely.

Startups move at a very fast pace, and details like security, elasticity, and availability can end up neglected due to wanting to release a product or service as quickly as possible. By utilizing AWS, Citus Health was able to leverage built in tools and services to secure their environment and ensure that their services remain available and resilient.

Slack recently launched a new Digital Toolkit that brought together 11 must-have tools for your startup. As part of this campaign, AWS Activate – a free program specifically designed for startups and early stage entrepreneurs – teamed up with Slack to provide you with resources and expert support to go to market faster, and lower your startup costs

We want to help you stay focused on your customers and building features for your products, so we’ve put together a list of the most common mistakes we see founders make on AWS, paired with advice on how to avoid them to save you time and money. 

Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL) provides access to a highly automated laboratory, equipped with over 200 unique pieces of scientific instrumentation, to any scientist with a computer and internet connection. As their cloud lab expands to meet growing demand, they’ve faced a growing need for scalable, on-demand compute. To address this growth, ECL built Manifold, a microservices-based architecture that runs on AWS Fargate.

Early stage startups have many technical decisions to make while pursuing product-market fit. Some technical decisions are reversible, while others are critical junctures with long-term impacts.

Nonprofits are often overwhelmed by the amount of data they accumulate, and lack the resources to generate value from it. In response to this challenge, charitable organization Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Berlin was founded. As part of their mission to enlist volunteer data scientists and analysts to help nonprofits use their data properly, DSSG Berlin hosted Datathon, a data science hackathon powered by AWS services.

Camino Financial is dedicated to helping small businesses grow to reach their potential. Leading with empathy, this family-founded, financial technology platform startup aims to bring affordable credit to under-banked Latinx micro businesses, and empower underrepresented communities to build generational wealth.

Cost optimization is a priority for customers of all sizes, but founders particularly want to make sure their financial resources are being used properly and they’re getting the most out of AWS. Here are a few approaches that early-stage startups can implement easily in order to get the most out of AWS in a cost-effective manner.