Four Australian artificial intelligence-based startups will feature among 80 globally in the second AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator program.
Contact Harald, Marqo, Relevance AI, and Splash Music were selected for the program and score up to US$1 million each in AWS credits, mentorship, and education to accelerate AI innovation with AWS. They’ll also get the chance to showcase their products at the week-long Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in December.
More than 4500 startups globally applied to be part of the 10-week AWS accelerator, which gives early-stage startups the opportunity to learn go-to-market strategies, access to mentorship, and AWS credits that will help them build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions.
They get access to AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, energy-efficient AI chips, as well as credits for Amazon SageMaker, which helps companies build and train their own foundation models. The program kicks off on October 1 at Amazon’s HQ1 in Seattle.
Contact Harald is a voice-first AI conversation platform for businesses.
Founder and chief product officer Matt Denton said they’re hoping to learn what works and doesn’t work in terms of infrastructure, pipelines and processes from participating in the accelerator.
“One of the core tenets of our Ask Harry conversation platform is utilising cutting-edge AI tools and methodologies to deliver a seamless, conversational voice-to-voice assistant,” he said.
“We’re looking forward to working with heavyweights in AI and learning from their experience to build on our existing software and hardware platform. The next phase of our evolution is automated retrieval of multimodal information.”
Marqo is a vector embeddings training and retrieval cloud. It’s been a great week for the startup, a finalist in the Startup Daily Best in Tech awards in the AI Gamechanger category, after also being singled as as one of eight startups in the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First cohort program in Australia.
The Melbourne startup was cofounded by two former Amazon employees, Jesse Clark and Tom Hamer, who 12 months ago raised $8.1 million Seed round.
Hamer said he was thrilled to be part of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator.
“This program lets us utilise AWS’s extensive expertise and resources to improve Marqo’s platform and help our customers train and deploy embeddings at scale,” he said.
“Marqo has been working with AWS from day one, and with Amazon’s customer-obsessed culture at our core, we are excited to continue strengthening this partnership through the GenAI accelerator.”
Splash Music is an gaming & music AI company and CEO Tracy Chan said the program unlocks a massive opportunity to further scale their ethically-trained music models.
“We’re excited to leverage tools like Amazon SageMaker to develop, train, deploy proprietary models, as well as make use of Amazon Bedrock and its LLMs to pre-train, fine-tune and improve prompt engineering in the music-creation workflows for the 450 million-plus users who’ve played our Roblox game,” he said.
Relevance AI is a workflow automation startup that last December raised a $15 million Series A. Cofounder and co-CEO Daniel Vassilev said they’ll leveraging the AWS resources “to further push the boundaries of what’s possible with fine-tuned models and fast inference”.
AWS ANZ Head of Startups John Kearney said he was proud to see Australian startups mixing it with the world’s best.
“For over 18 years, AWS has empowered more startups to build, launch, and scale their businesses than any other cloud provider. It’s no coincidence that 96% of AI/ML unicorns run on AWS,” he said.
“It’s still early days and we remain committed to nurturing the next wave of startup innovation in generative AI locally in Australia and New Zealand and around the world.”
The selection of the four for the global accelerator follows on from the recent AWS Generative AI Spotlight program for local startups.
