AWS enabling startups to innovate, scale up globally
India saw growth across Series A & B funding up to $1.47 billion, a nearly 300 per cent jump year-over-year; and over 200 per cent increase in Series C+ funding.
Hyderabad: AWS assists early-stage startups succeed at every stage of their lifecycle – from the time founders conceptualise a startup idea, develop a minimum viable product, acquire their first customers, and achieve global scale. Kumara Raghavan, India Head, AWS Startup Sales, Amazon Internet Services shares with Y V Phani Raj the future potential of technology-driven startups and domains in India and reasons why entrepreneurs should embrace new technologies and digital platforms in 2022 and beyond. Excerpts-
Growth momentum
According to CB Insights data, in Q3 2021, India saw growth across Series A & B funding up to $1.47 billion, a nearly 300 per cent jump year-over-year; and over 200 per cent increase in Series C+ funding. Given this kind of scenario in India’s startup landscape, technology support from AWS is proving pivotal in enabling startups to sustain this growth and scale with agility in a cost optimised manner.
Handholding startups
My team of vertical and horizontal business domain experts, AWS technical architects, former startup founders, and investors focuses on enabling startups in the healthtech, gaming, fintech and other industry segments accelerate their speed to delivery and digital transformation. We also collaborate with an AWS team that works closely with venture capital firms, incubators, and accelerators to enable their portfolio companies to leverage the breadth and depth of AWS Cloud through AWS Activate Program and AWS Connections.
Wide-ranging support
AWS is working with several thousands of startups and with the help of our flagship programme called Activate, we extend them computing credits, technical support, and business mentorship. In 2020, we extended $1 billion worth of cloud credits globally. We provide over 200 services to startups and enable connections to them.
Irrespective of the stage of startups, there has been growth in India, and the momentum has been accelerating. We work with startups throughout their growth journey. Through Build on AWS, we are offering pre-build/configured SaaS models for startups so that they can focus on their core business.
We have close to 48 templates for early-stage startups. We are also supporting startups with machine learning capabilities so that they can handle data better, through our Amazon SageMaker initiative. We have also introduced serverless capabilities to manage data. AWS Graviton 2 processor has benefited companies with process capabilities that reduced the cost of compute and improved performance.
Domain trends
India could be on the cusp of unlocking a $1 trillion opportunity for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies by 2030, according to the SaaSBOOMi-McKinsey study. We have an AWS SaaS factory programme to help startups and SaaS architects. Among major sectors, in the last few quarters, fintech saw significant funding and prolific growth rate, while e-commerce remained another major sector in terms of investments with a growing delivery segment, addressing last mile problems.
AWS helps e-commerce companies in terms of predictive analytics of consumer behaviour and maintaining 99.9 per cent uptime. Edutech companies are also seeing a lot of momentum, with digitisation set to grow further in 2022, driven by the government’s new education policy. We came out with AWS EdStart, an accelerator programme, to provide companies needed learning and campus management solutions with promotional credit, technical training, and support.
Healthcare has been pivotal in terms of mitigating the Covid impact, which continues to attract funding. Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission will lead to further digitisation of health records across stakeholders to ensure seamless experience, opening new opportunities. Patient-oriented innovations will continue to happen. AWS has been working with startups in healthcare such as telemedicine, patient care, online pharmacies, diagnostics and others.
Niche areas
Social commerce is an emerging sector. AWS is helping companies in this space in terms of content moderation. Funding is going to grow in this space in 2022 and even after. We are also nurturing women-led startups with an acceleration programme connecting them with mentors, investors and industry leaders, to bring disruption across sectors.
We are also partnering with several ecosystem partners and offer our Activate Program to incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, government bodies, and universities for their portfolio companies. We are also enabling 70 channel partners and their sellers to understand startup needs better.
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