Four Australian startups, Contact Harald, Marqo, Relevance AI, and Splash Music, have been chosen to join the prestigious AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator .
The companies, recognized for their innovative AI applications, will receive support from Amazon Web Services to scale their businesses and contribute to the global AI landscape.
As part of AWS’s US$230 million commitment to accelerate the creation of applications worldwide, the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program provides startups, especially early-stage companies, with AWS credits, mentorship, and education to further their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. Participants gain access to AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, energy-efficient AI chips that offer high performance at the lowest cost. The credits can also be used on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that helps companies build and train their own foundation models (FMs), as well as to access models and tools to easily and securely build generative AI applications through Amazon Bedrock.
The 10-week program matches participants with both business and technical mentors based on their industry, and chosen startups will receive up to US$1 million each in AWS credits to help them build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions. Participants will also have access to technology and technical sessions from program presenting partner NVIDIA, a pioneer in accelerated computing.
Matt Denton, founder and chief product officer at Contact Harald, a voice-first AI conversation platform for businesses, said: “We’re so excited to be part of the AWS Global AI 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. 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. We hope to learn what works and doesn’t work in terms of infrastructure, pipelines and processes from participating in the accelerator to help us address these challenges faster.”
Tom Hamer, co-founder and CEO at Marqo, a vector embeddings training and retrieval cloud, said: “We are thrilled to be part of the 2024 AWS Generative AI Accelerator. This program lets us utilize AWS’s extensive expertise and resources to improve Marqo’s platform and help our customers train and deploy embeddings at scale. 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.”
Tracy Chan, CEO at Splash Music, a gaming & music AI company, said: “The AWS Generative AI Accelerator unlocks a massive opportunity for Splash to further scale our 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 450M+ users who’ve played our Roblox game.”
Daniel Vassilev, co-founder and co-CEO at Relevance AI, home of the AI Workforce, said: “We are excited to partner with the AWS GenAI Accelerator to continue building world-class infrastructure and models. Our sole focus is on delivering flagship experiences for our customers to enable reliable and powerful reasoning and execution of tasks through our AI Agents. We’ll be leveraging the provided resources to further push the boundaries of what’s possible with fine-tuned models and fast inference.”
John Kearney, Head of Startups at AWS Australia and New Zealand, said: “We’re so proud of the talented Aussie cohort in this year’s AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator. Next month, Contact Harald, Marqo, Relevance.ai, and Splash Music will spend 10 weeks with nearly 80 other leading generative AI startups from around the world to participate in business and technical mentorship, networking opportunities with experts, advance its go-to-market strategies, with the objective to help turbocharge their growth and shape future product and strategy. 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. 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.”
According to PitchBook Data, Inc, 546 AI & machine learning companies have raised funding in Australia, with over US$506 million in investment to date in 2024. However, 35% of generative AI companies globally have offices in locations outside their headquarter country, revealing that much more can be done to support these businesses to expand globally.
Brendan Burke, Senior Analyst, Emerging Technology Research, PitchBook, said: “Asia-Pacific-based generative AI companies have raised over $2.5 billion in 2024, more than the prior three years combined. Developers and startups are seizing the opportunity to train custom models based on unique cultural and linguistic data. Additionally, leading AI researchers are working on a diversity of transformer models in multimodal domains including 3D images, interactive media, and synthetic voice. The future of AI applications will rely on specialized model architectures and startups will need world-class cloud infrastructure to fulfill their vision.”
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