Amazon Web Services- a Huge boon to Startups
Success stories of some startups like ROYBI, HappyFresh, and BlueDot which were benefited by cloud computing services from AWS(Amazon Web Services)
Today’s Startups which need establishment and are non-sponsored or with low investment, have AWS as a boon. AWS supports startups by launching and providing them all the services at affordable prices. AWS follows Pay As We Go model, making it flexible for the clients to pay according to their demands and needs.
Owing to this public cloud many startups reached immense heights and still growing.
Some Startups with their success stories
ROYBI
“ROYBI Robot is a very complicated product. But with AWS technology solutions, services, and support, we were able to get to market fast.”
- Elnaz Sarraf
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, ROYBI
ROYBI Inc. is a startup dedicated to reinventing early-childhood education. “There’s so much attention on higher education, but when it comes to early education, you don’t see many strong tools or products,” says Elnaz Sarraf, ROYBI founder, and chief executive officer.
ROYBI Inc. created ROYBI Robot, an interactive language-learning tutor for children age three and older, which uses AI to deliver a personalized learning experience. In 2019, ROYBI Robot was featured as one of Time magazine’s 100 best inventions, and the company was named one of CNBC’s 100 most promising startups to watch.
To address this gap, Sarraf and Ron Cheng, ROYBI co-founder and chief technology officer, wanted to combine robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to create a fun, interactive learning experience that could go beyond traditional pedagogies.
Customized Solution with AWS
ROYBI was already using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide highly secure, scalable compute capacity for its website in the cloud. Once the company realized it needed help with AI and ML, ROYBI leaders turned to AWS EdStart for help. AWS EdStart helps EdTech entrepreneurs quickly build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions in the AWS Cloud. AWS EdStart, the AWS account and Alexa in Education teams, and ROYBI leaders joined forces to create a custom solution that would allow ROYBI to leverage AWS AI, ML, and other services to solve its technology challenges and get to market quickly. “AWS could provide us a total, powerful solution, including voice, facial recognition, and storage,” says Cheng. “That’s why we chose to standardize our workloads on AWS.”
Working together, AWS and ROYBI built a customized solution that uses Amazon Rekognition to facilitate a connection between ROYBI Robot and children in a friendly way. It also relies on Amazon Lex as the conversational interface that processes and understands what the children say and creates a multimodal experience that is engaging and educational. Additionally, the company takes advantage of Amazon Polly advanced deep-learning technologies to synthesize a natural-sounding human voice for ROYBI Robot.
Benefits of AWS for ROYBI Inc.
- Helps develop a friendly, interactive, educational robot for young students
- Speeds its language robot to market 5 months earlier than expected
- Prioritizes customer privacy
- Provides highly secure cloud-based technology
HappyFresh
“Activity on the platform doubles on average for the best campaigns, and AWS gives us the flexibility to scale to meet activity spikes.”
- Fajar Budiprasetyo
Co-founder, HappyFresh
HappyFresh is an online grocery shopping service operating in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Launched in 2015, the company partners with 278 supermarkets and stores that use HappyFresh’s platform and delivery services to offer customers online grocery shopping. The company delivers over 100,000 products via its app, which has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times.
The startup was born on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “Our strategy in terms of infrastructure is to outsource to a cloud provider. We believe AWS is the right cloud provider for us due to its data center location, security, and services. Moreover, our team is already quite familiar with AWS technology, and it is well supported by the community,” says Co-founder Fajar Budiprasetyo.
Solutions with AWS Services
With AWS, HappyFresh can protect its platform against shopper fraud. Every transaction on the HappyFresh platform generates a message, which is captured in Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), processed using AWS Lambda, and forwarded to a third-party fraud detection company. “AWS gives us protection against fraud without the need to maintain a dedicated infrastructure,” says Budiprasetyo.
The startup’s clickstream data is aggregated in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lake. AWS Glue extracts the data and processes it for analysis of customer shopping patterns. This ensures customers see the products they most likely will purchase and relevant promotions when they log on to the app.
The business is now anticipating customer demand using machine learning (ML) with Amazon SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker is helping us automate ML workflows and optimize our hyper-parameters. It allows for increasing the speed of development without the need for additional resources.
Benefits of AWS for HappyFresh
- Rapid scaling when data traffic spikes
- Efficient fraud detection processes
- Off-the-shelf personalization services
- Cost-effective ML capabilities
BlueDot
We’ve been using natural language processing and machine learning supported by AWS to extract vital pieces of information — the name of the pathogen, the location and the time of the outbreak, and other contextual data.”
- Kamran Khan
Founder and CEO, BlueDot
The world needs a global early warning system for infectious diseases, but governments and private organizations need technology to quickly identify disease outbreaks and mitigate potential risks. BlueDot’s software empowers governments, hospitals, and businesses to safeguard lives and livelihoods by identifying and mitigating infectious disease risk.
“We’ve been using machine learning to enhance the detection of global threats around the world in near real-time,” says Kamran Khan, founder, and CEO of BlueDot. BlueDot’s software-as-a-service platform “is gathering information on over 150 different diseases and syndromes in 65 languages and collecting this information every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day,” explains Khan. BlueDot scans official notifications, health forums, and online media for potential threats and cross-references those sources with commercial air-traffic itineraries and other datasets to predict outbreak risk and immediately notify its clients.
Benefits of Using AWS
BlueDot’s platform has to process a lot of data; that’s where Amazon Web Services (AWS) comes in. “We’ve been using natural language processing and machine learning supported by AWS to extract vital pieces of information — the name of the pathogen, the location and the time of the outbreak, and other contextual data,” says Khan. For example, BlueDot used its platform to detect an outbreak in Wuhan, China — of what would later come to be known as COVID-19. “Using these analytics, we identified the top 20 cities that we thought would be at the greatest risk of an impact if COVID-19 were to continue to spread, and spread ultimately outside of mainland China,” says Khan.
