How Is AWS's Gateway ‘Accelerating’ Startups?

How startup ecosystem is changing? What role do technology and innovation play here?

In the last couple of years, we have moved from the land of making promises to performance, resulting in the delivery of promises and potential that we have in our country. Startups are at the forefront and the drivers of our economy. 

According to the recent reports, the amount of funding that came into the startup ecosystem grew 173 per cent YoY which led to more unicorns last year than all the previous years. One, there was a buoyant public market. Second, there are a lot of active local investors, some fresh from the IPO, as well as multiple second, third, and fourth time investors. And all this also contributed to very positive sentiment around the startup ecosystem.

The second thing that we saw was regulatory tailwinds. When you pick a vertical like fintech, one of the things that we saw was we had the e-rupee system, which ensured that when it came to transferring of benefits it was a lot more leakproof. When RBI came up with an account aggregator system, it opened up a number of opportunities for fintech. So, we had customers in our portfolio like KreditBee, Cash Karo, ZestMoney, and Credit Vidya in different fields from payments or loans or credit underwriting, they’ve all been able to be significant re-evolution on their fintech domain.

Another similar area that has significant momentum due to regulatory changes is healthcare. We have the Bharat Digital Mission which allows data across all the providers. Many startups are even able to use machine learning models using anonymised patient data, and then predict better for caregivers and hospitals.

Fintech and Healthtech are the two major sectors that are booming. How is AWS helping startups penetrate into Tier II and Tier III cities? How are AWS technologies aiding them?

In fintech, one of our customers called Credit Vidya is into financial inclusion. They serve the category of population, who are considered low earners and never had a bank account. They were able to digitize their salary and as a result, were able to reach over 70 million users. It changed the level of financial inclusion and the difference that they've been able to make in the fintech space.

Another example is healthcare, HealthifyMe, during the pandemic came up with an app called VaccinateMe. When vaccinations were first made available for the public with smartphone booking, we realized a big part of our country is still not using basic phones. HealthifyMe with their Vaccinate Me enabled over 50 million bookings with simple phones as well.

Our gateway for most of the startups is a program called Activate, which is a foundational program through which every startup can get started on AWS platform.

It has three below given components:

First is credits, while using cloud compute, we take away cost for the initial periods because when the startups are in the early part of their journey, building a minimum viable product and getting to the cloud can be a huge part of the expense. The second thing is the support which is a part of Activate. The third one is around training.

Does AWS provide customized solutions to startups as well?

We have a variety of services starting from computing, storage, databases, analytics, Internet of Things, and AI ML. 

In the top layer, we have ready-made services. Let's say you're a bank and want to incorporate a KYC process that involves video recording for a customer. If they are not able to come to the branch, we make sure that the person on the video is a real person by, giving them some instructions to move and see that all of those are available as ready-made services. 

In the middle layer, we have Amazon Sagemaker, which brings together a lot of frameworks for expert users. Startups and organizations have data scientists and other developers who want to build their own models, but they want to use ready-made frameworks, which are already accessible and put together.

Under the third layer, we provide infrastructure and frameworks used by skilled ML developers and data scientists.

Around 12 startups entered the unicorn club in 2022 so far. How is AWS helping startups in becoming unicorns?

Let's pick Upstox, they are in the stock market business and retail trade. They have been able to enable a number of users to get into the stock market for the first time. In 2020, most of their technology was based on an infrastructure that they held on their own. And at that point, when we look at January 2020, they had 2 million users. The potential in India in terms of the number of people wanting to invest and grow is the problem they wanted to solve at scale. There are four factors that mattered to them:

1. They want to quickly scale users, while they keep adding users.

2. They want to do it in a way where the user experience is not compromised. 

3. This one is around latency, where there is not much delay when the price changes again.

4. This one is around regulation of data, as they want to keep it within the country

In terms of technology, the first choice for them was to move to a cloud so that they are able to manage their infrastructure. Features like AWS Auto Scaling came to their rescue. 

With that change in strategy, in January 2021, they were around 2 million in terms of users and by the time the year ended, they were at 8 million users. Now they are one of the largest stockbrokers in the country. A lot of heavy lifting for technology is taken away from the cloud from AWS so that they can focus on app features and benefits that can be given to a customer.

What are your long-term plans or short-term goals for this year?

We have seen the startup ecosystem grow. But one thing we are very cognizant of is that there is not a huge amount in the number of women-funded startups. From my perspective, that's one area that we are constantly focusing on. We began last year with a program called Techxelerate which is a four-week program in collaboration, with the Indian women's institutional League (IWIL). 

The second one is around our partner ecosystem. We work with venture capitalists, incubators, co-working spaces, and universities, which tend to bring out a lot of startups. AWS works with all of these agencies and ensures that they are part of Activate, so that any startup that is beginning its journey, has the technology powered by these infrastructures.

The third one is the new region. Currently, we have Mumbai as a region with three availability zones. We are going to launch Hyderabad as the second region and will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end-users from data centres located in India.

Going forward, sustainability is a key area that would require more focus. In your perspective, how would you balance these two - innovation and sustainability?

At Amazon, we typically operate with our leadership principles. And last year, we had 14 of them. Towards the end of last year, we added one of them which was around sustainability, to ensure that we leave this place better than what we inherited. In our traditional technical architecture, we have a process called AWS Well-Architected Framework wherein we take a customer through that journey, traditionally it has five pillars, with features like cost, efficiency, security, and so on, and the sixth pillar is around sustainability which reduces power consumption at the backend. The second is we are constantly looking to ensure that we are net zero carbon by 2040, which is 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement.