(BPT) - Startups are at the forefront of a revolution, harnessing the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to drive innovation like never before. Whether creating images, videos, insights from unstructured data, or better, cheaper new medicines, the potential for groundbreaking solutions is vast.

Recognizing this immense opportunity, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing heavily in the generative AI space, providing startups with the crucial resources they need to overcome initial costs and develop and deploy foundational models, fine tune and launch AI applications. These investments are not just fueling the next wave of tech advancements but are also empowering startups to make a significant impact on the future of innovation.

Investing in innovation

AWS has committed $230 million in the form of AWS Credits to accelerate the creation of generative AI applications by startups around the world. This commitment was announced as AWS shared it's now accepting applications for its Generative AI Accelerator program, aimed to turbocharge the development of new generative AI applications and bring innovations to market faster.

The program won't just provide funds to budding companies, but also provide technical and business support for early-stage companies using AI and machine learning (ML) technologies to build world-changing products on the AWS cloud.

The AWS Generative AI Accelerator program was the first of its kind and has already seen early success. Last year's cohort of 21 global startups drove unprecedented innovations in media and entertainment, drug discovery, software engineering and more.

Among these trailblazers, Leonardo.AI has made significant strides with its powerful suite of generative AI tools for creators. The support from AWS enabled Leonardo.AI to scale its platform to meet the rapidly growing demand from a global user community. With AWS's robust generative AI infrastructure, Leonardo.AI reduced inferencing costs by 60% and accelerated language model inference speeds by up to 35%. For the startup, the accelerator program provided invaluable business and technical mentorship and facilitated crucial connections that helped shape Leonardo.AI's product and strategy, highlighting the transformative potential of the AWS Accelerator program in paving the future of innovation.

Applications for the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program are now open and will be accepted until July 19. This year's cohort will admit 80 global early-stage startups using generative AI to solve complex challenges. To qualify for the program, startups must advance generative AI by building foundation models, conducting training and inference proof-of-concepts or deploying Large Language Models (LLMs).

This isn't the first time the company has supported the growth of startups. Through AWS Activate, the company has provided nearly $1 billion in credits annually to startups to build their solutions with little-to-no upfront costs and supported founders with self-service business and technical content. The AWS Generative AI Accelerator program is a natural extension of the company's goal of nurturing the next generation of innovators.

Providing resources for AI startup success

The 2024 accelerator will provide each participating startup with up to $1 million in AWS credits to access AWS's world-class cloud infrastructure technologies. These include computing, storage, databases and the best price-performance ML accelerators, AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2.

Startups can also use credits on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, a fully managed service designed to help companies build and train their own foundational models, as well as on third-party models from leading AI companies through Amazon Bedrock.

Beyond funds, the program also offers startup founders mentorship opportunities. During the 10-week program, participants will be matched with business and technical mentors to help them build, train, test and launch their AI solutions.

"AWS has the right combination of technology and network of partners and potential customers in the life sciences space that made it the best fit to support our vision of building the next generation of AI models for drug discovery," said Nima Alidoust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Vevo Therapeutics, one of the 21 companies to join the program in 2023.

The AI-driven biotechnology startup is building the world's first platform to generate large-scale, high-resolution, single-cell in vivo data. "Participating in the accelerator provided us with valuable opportunities to tap into this community and to leverage AWS's infrastructure and expertise in scaling model training and development."

The future of AI is at your fingertips

Do you want to be part of shaping the future of AI? Applications for the program are open today. Selected startups will be announced Sept. 10, 2024, and the program will kick off Oct. 1, 2024, with in-person sessions at Amazon's HQ1 in Seattle, Washington.

The program will culminate at re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada, where all 80 participants will be invited to attend and join activities, including showcasing their solutions to potential investors, customers, partners and AWS leaders.

To learn more about the opportunities for generative AI startups with AWS and the application process for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, visit Startups.AWS.