Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that seven generative AI startups from India have been selected for the AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator program. The selected Indian startups— Convrse, House of Models, Neural Garage, Orbo.ai, Phot.ai, Unscript AI, and Zocket, are among the 80 companies selected by AWS worldwide for their innovative use of AI and their global growth ambitions. The Indian cohort also represents the highest number of startups selected from a country in the Asia-Pacific region for the AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator program. The selected startups will also be invited to AWS’s premier annual event, re:Invent, in Las Vegas, where they will showcase their solutions on a global stage.
As part of AWS’s US$230 million commitment to accelerate the creation of applications worldwide, the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program provides startups, especially early-stage companies, with AWS credits, mentorship, and education to further their use of AI and ML technologies. Selected startups will gain access to AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, energy-efficient AI chips that offer high performance at the lowest cost. The credits can also be used on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that helps companies build and train their own foundation models (FMs), as well as to access models and tools to easily and securely build generative AI applications through Amazon Bedrock.
The 10-week program matches participants with both business and technical mentors based on their industry, and chosen startups will receive up to US$1 million each in AWS credits to help them build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions. Participants will also have access to technology and technical sessions from program presenting partner NVIDIA, a pioneer in accelerated computing.
“We are thrilled to announce the seven Indian startups that have been selected for the AWS global generative AI accelerator program. The Indian cohort represents the highest number of startups selected for the accelerator in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region. The selected startups are at the forefront of tapping into the transformative potential of generative AI to build innovative solutions,” said Amitabh Nagpal, Head, Startup Business Development, AWS India. “At AWS, our $230 million commitment and global expansion of the generative AI accelerator reflects our continued focus on supporting startups to develop, build and scale their unique ideas using generative AI. We are excited to witness the pioneering advancements that the selected startups will bring to solve complex challenges in India and worldwide.”
In India, AWS continues to support generative AI startups through initiatives such as AWS GenAI Loft, a collaborative pop-up space recently hosted in Bangalore to promote innovation in AI. It offered visitors a unique platform to gain insights and explore real-world applications of generative AI across industries.
According to PitchBook Data, Inc, 1,813 AI and ML companies have raised funding in India with over US$82 billion in investments to date in 2024. However, only 35% of generative AI companies globally have offices in locations outside their headquarter country, revealing that more can be done to support startups realise their growth ambitions.
“Asia-Pacific-based generative AI companies have raised over $2.5 billion in 2024, more than the prior three years combined,” said Brendan Burke, Senior Analyst, Emerging Technology Research, PitchBook. “Developers and startups are seising the opportunity to train custom models based on unique cultural and linguistic data. Additionally, leading AI researchers are working on a diversity of transformer models in multimodal domains including 3D images, interactive media, and synthetic voice. The future of AI applications will rely on specialised model architectures and startups will need world-class cloud infrastructure to fulfill their vision.”