Join the Generative AI startup program in Australia from AWS

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hottest sector for startup investors globally right now.

And if you’re a founder on the hunt for funds to build your idea, you need AI as a key part of the arsenal to grab their attention.

Australia’s most successful tech companies, including Canva and Atlassian, have made generative AI central to their products and rising stars such as Leonardo.Ai and New Zealand legaltech LawVu have made it central to their success.

But if you’re keen to take your use of generative AI to the next level, what do you need to succeed?

That’s the question a new program from the team at Amazon Web Services (AWS) set out to answer, bringing their international experience and insights to Australia for the first time.

The AWS Generative AI Spotlight program is for seed and pre-seed generative AI startups in Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia.

Kicking off in July, it’s designed to fast-track your generative AI startup in just four weeks, giving you knowledge, understanding and fluency with generative AI tools and services from AWS.

The program is for MVP-ready startups and gives their teams access to world-leading knowledge and mentorship and expertise from top AI/ML industry leaders, founders and investors.

You’ll hear from best-in-class generative AI startups, leading LLM producers, AWS engineers and industry-leading technical experts as they take a deep dive on your business to optimise around emerging tech and evolving business practices.

You’ll also receive technical support as you build and refine your generative AI startup with AWS and the team will help you leverage access to and guidance from executive, go-to-market, and technical advisors, with support from AWS Startups to help you grow faster.

Leading startups trust AWS to innovate with generative AI because it brings enterprise-grade security and privacy to the table, along with access to industry-leading foundation models (FMs), and generative AI-powered applications.

AWS makes it easy to build and scale generative AI—optimised for your data, your use cases, and your customers.

John Kearney from AWS Startups said AWS Generative AI Spotlight is for startups that can demonstrate early-stage traction.

“Ideally, you’ll have an MVP already developed and some early customers, with your eyes on raising a seed round in the next six to 12 months,” he said.

“We welcome AI-first startups with technical leads who are leveraging cloud technologies, or who plan to. If you have game-changing ambitions in the generative AI space, we want to support you.”

Kearney said the AWS team see the local startup sector as a driving force in generative AI innovation.

“The Generative AI Spotlight is designed to help a select group of Asia Pacific’s early-stage startups in this space to take their ideas off the ground,” he said.

“With a program tailored to meet the needs of generative AI startups, the AWS Generative AI Spotlight will provide access to models and tools technical deep dives, customised go-to-market strategies, machine learning stack optimisation, and cohort community networking.”

Alongside the advice and mentoring, the startup teams involved become part of an exclusive virtual community of cohort members from across Asia-Pacific and Japan, and will receive invites to exclusive networking and learning events with AWS executives, AWS Partners, and top tier investors in key cities across the region.

Applications for the AWS Generative AI Spotlight program are open now. They close on July 7 and the successful applicants will be told if they’ve been accepted shortly after. Keep your diary clear for the rest of July – the program will run from July 15 – August 9.

To find out more and apply, go to the AWS Generative AI Spotlight page here.

This article is brought to you by Startup Daily in partnership with AWS.