AWS Startups Blog

Kateryna Khotkevych, Software Engineer at food delivery service Delivery Hero, talks to us about how data helps the delivery industry, how the company uses machine learning, and how AWS helps them grow their business. 

Join us this week for an inside look into security startups building on Amazon Web Services! We are joined by some startups from the security industry to discuss how they got their start, their company missions, and how Amazon Web Services helped them accomplish their architectural goals.

As hoteliers shift more and more toward becoming data scientists, the amount of data needed—and available—is growing at exponential rates. It’s critical that this data is stored somewhere easily accessible in real time for operators and technology systems, while at the same time kept safe and secure.

Whether you have 1 or 1,000,000 users, building a scalable web application that can handle peaks and dips in traffic is vital to the long-term success of your startup. And, one that should be planned in advanced so that, as you grow, the correct scaling architecture is in place. But, as a new startup, how do you plan for high loads while also juggling a growing business? Eric Yip, Co-founder and CTO of adtech startup Track Revenue, recently joined us at the AWS Loft in San Francisco to share the mistakes and lessons learned along their journey to a scalable architecture. He unpacked the principles of developing high-performance applications as well as provided the audience with considerations and tips on building a well-designed application that’s both resilient and scalable. 

For Ira Cohen, founder and chief data scientist of Anodot, timing is everything. Despite having 11 years of work at Hewlett Packard under his belt, he always knew that when the right idea and timing struck, he’d make his way into the startup world. The right timing turned out to be about four and a half years ago. The right idea? Anodot, an autonomous analytics company that uses machine learning techniques to equip business owners with the tools they need to learn and grow using data.

Converting a potential buyer into an actual customer isn’t easy. The key to making the sale isn’t having more conversations, it’s having better conversations. Gong is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams improve their interactions with prospective buyers by analyzing these discussions in real time and providing Sales Conversation Intelligence. “We capture all of their sales conversations: phone, video conferencing, emails, telephone systems, bring them into a single platform, and make the whole conversation visible to the organization,” says Eilon Reshef, CTO and co-founder of Gong.

Jarvis Johnson, an engineering manager on Patreon’s creator acquisition team, describes Patreon’s mission as “to fund the emerging creative class, or get creators paid.” Indeed, with $300 million creator earnings in 2018 alone (and just $12 average monthly patronage, per patron), the platform has allowed creators to double their annual income. However, Johnson notes, “there are some situations where we wouldn’t want to pay someone, like in the case of fraud.” Since Patreon processes millions of payments each month, identifying fraudulent payments can be a challenge.

Driving remains one of the quintessential American activities. Over 90 percent of US households have at least one car, and drivers spend an average of around 290 hours a year in their vehicles. And, thanks to the auto industry’s recent embrace of data technology, much of that time on the road now produces an enormous amount of useful information. David Hallac is the founder and CEO of Viaduct, a new company creating a machine learning platform for managing, analyzing, and monetizing that data.

The average executive spends 16 years of his or her life in a meeting. That’s a quite a bit of time, so it makes sense to try to maximize meetings for efficiency and productivity. That’s where Klaxoon comes in. A collaborative platform designed to improve teamwork, Klaxoon lets everyone in a meeting share information and feel as if the’re being heard. To help spread the meeting revolution, Klaxoon, led by Charles Kergaravat, Director of International Marketing, is currently on a 11-week, 16-city teamwork tour, where they’re traveling the world in a truck and sharing productivity tips, workshops, and demos from the world’s biggest organizations.

Founded in 2015, Carlabs.ai offers an artificial intelligence-based customer service platform for the auto industry. Previously, car manufacturers had little contact with the end user. They’d sell the cars to a dealer, who then would do the customer interaction work. Consumers these days all want a direct connection with a brand, and that connection is what Carlabs.ai helps facilitate.