Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Accel, a venture capital firm, have joined forces to establish ML Elevate 2023, an accelerator programme that will assist start-ups developing generative artificial intelligence (AI) products.
According to a press release, the six-week programme will provide generative AI start-ups with access to AI models and tools, commercial and technical mentorship, curated resources, the AWS Activate programme, and up to $200,000 in AWS Credits. AWS Activate is a programme that gives credits, technical assistance, and resources to startups in order for them to create and expand their businesses on Amazon Web Services.
Other advantages include peer assistance from an AI and ML start-up founder network and the ability to scale production-ready generative AI apps on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. By providing a collection of pre-built solutions, templates, and resources suited to certain use cases, the SageMaker programme is intended to simplify and accelerate the process of generating and deploying machine learning models.
The programme is open to generative AI start-ups that have a minimal viable product (MVP) and aim to seek investment within the next 12-18 months. Selected start-ups will participate in live virtual master classes, which will include fireside talks and panel discussions with investors, industry leaders, and AWS specialists. Tom Mason, Chief Technology Officer, Stability AI; Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia-South, NVIDIA Graphics; Poonacha Kongetira, SVP Engineering at SambaNova (US); Anupam Datta, Co-founder, President, and Chief Scientist, TruEra (USA); and Apurva Kalia, Senior Researcher, Tufts University (USA) are among the speakers on the panel. The cohort will also get the chance to raise financing during a special demo week in which they will pitch top VC firms, angel investors, and industry experts.
“Generative AI heralds a new era of innovation and productivity in all spheres of life. We are witnessing an ever-increasing pace of innovation in LLMs, LLMOps, ML models and GPU compute. ML Elevate offers a robust opportunity to entrepreneurs and start-ups building in the generative AI space. It was great to collaborate on ML Elevate last year, and we are looking forward to working with AWS and selected start-ups this year too," says Prayank Swaroop, Partner, Accel.
AWS reports that approximately 50 early-stage AI/ML start-ups in India have participated in the ML Elevate programmes since 2020, including Indian AI start-ups such as AarogyaAI, Dubdub.ai, Vitra.ai, and NimbleBox.ai. According to a recent National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) survey, generative AI start-ups in the nation collected approximately $475 million in private financing between January 2021 and May 2023.
According to Vaishali Kasture, Director of AWS India and South Asia at Amazon Web Services India, ML Elevate will enable sector start-ups to build industry-focused solutions and stimulate innovation to power the digital economy.
