With the worldwide business forming around GenAI anticipated to grow into a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, there are plenty of startups fighting for a piece of the pie. While traditional funding models continue to drive the majority of capital investment, more tailored strategies are gaining popularity.

To that aim, AWS has announced a $230 million commitment to help global startups accelerate GenAI app development. This financing is aimed at early-stage firms and will take the form of AWS credits, mentorship, and AI and ML education programs.

A portion of the funding will also be utilized to support the second wave of candidates for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a program that helps organizations employ GenAI to address tough problems. The AWS Generative AI Accelerator program supports the best 80 early-stage GenAI entrepreneurs, providing them with industry-specific business and technical mentorship as well as $1 million in AWS credits to help them create, train, test, and launch GenAI products.

Legacy of AI Excellence

“For more than 18 years, AWS has helped more startups to build, launch, and scale their businesses than any other cloud provider—it’s no coincidence that 96% of all AI/ML unicorns run on AWS,” said Matt Wood, vice president, Artificial Intelligence Products at AWS.

“With this new effort, we will help startups launch and scale world-class businesses, providing the building blocks they need to unleash new AI applications that will impact all facets of how the world learns, connects, and does business.”

The crucial figure is that 96% of all AI/ML unicorns use AWS. Startups can use the credits from its existing investment commitment to access leading AWS AI services such as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2 AI chips, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Bedrock.

These are the technologies used by firms at the forefront of AI and machine learning, and this funding announcement not only assures that startups have access to the same tools as industry giants, but also that AWS maintains its enviable position of supporting nearly all of them.

In many ways, this latest funding pledge is consistent with Amazon’s strategic approach to AI teaching and mentoring. It builds on the company’s AI Ready project, which launched in November 2023 and included a pledge to train two million individuals in AI capabilities by 2025.

It’s difficult to think of another technology, aside from GenAI, that has created so many prospects for reciprocal growth, where both the service provider and the end user may benefit.

The appetite for GenAI is such that if a company has established a compelling use case, which is becoming increasingly difficult in this very competitive sector, it can nearly ensure a steady customer base.