Category: Startups

It is the end of 2016! Tina Barr has a great roundup of all the startups we featured this year. Check it out and see if you managed to read about them all, then come back in January for when we start up all over again.

Also- I wanted to thank Elsa Mayer for her hard work in helping out with the startup posts.

-Ana

What a year it has been for startups! We began the Hot Startups series in March as a way to feature exciting AWS-powered startups and the motivation behind the products and services they offer. Since then we’ve featured 27 startups across a wide range of industries including healthcare, commerce, social, finance, and many more. Each startup offers a unique product to its users – whether it’s an entertaining app or website, an educational platform, or a product to help businesses grow, startups have the ability to reach customers far and wide.

The startups we showcased this year are headquartered all over the world. Check them out on the map below!

In case you missed any of the posts, here is a list of all the hot startups we featured in 2016:

March

• Intercom – One place for every team in an Internet business to see and talk
  to customers, personally, at scale.
• Tile – A popular key locator product that works with an app to help people find their stuff.
• Bugsnag – A tool to capture and analyze runtime errors in production web and mobile applications.
• DroneDeploy  – Making the sky productive and accessible for everyone.

April

• Robinhood – Free stock trading to democratize access to financial markets.
• Dubsmash – Bringing joy to communication through video
• Sharethrough – An all-in-one native advertising platform.

June

• Shaadi.com – Helping South Asians to find a companion for life.
• Capillary– Boosting customer engagement for e-commerce.
• Monzo – A mobile-first bank.

July

• Depop– A social mobile marketplace for artists and friends to buy and sell products.
• Nextdoor – Building stronger and safer neighborhoods through technology.
• Branch – Provides free deep linking technology for mobile app developers to gain and retain users.

August

• Craftsvilla– Offering a platform to purchase ethnic goods.
• SendBird – Helping developers build 1-on-1 messaging and group chat quickly.
• Teletext.io – A solution for content management, without the system.
• Wavefront– A cloud-based analytics platform.

September

• Funding Circle – The leading online marketplace for business loans.
• Karhoo– A ride comparison app.
• nearbuy – Connecting customers and local merchants across India.

October

• Optimizely – Providing web and mobile A/B testing for the world’s leading brands.
• Touch Surgery – Building technologies for the global surgical community.
• WittyFeed – Creating viral content.

November

• AwareLabs – Helping small businesses build smart websites.
• Doctor On Demand– Delivering fast, easy, and cost-effective access to top healthcare providers.
• Starling Bank – Mobile banking for the next generation.
• VigLink – Powering content-driven commerce.

Thank you for keeping up with us as we shared these startups’ amazing stories throughout the year. Be sure to check back here in January for our first hot startups of 2017!

-Tina Barr

Tina is back with another impressive set of startups!

— Jeff;

This month we are featuring four hot AWS-powered startups:

• AwareLabs – Helping small businesses build smart websites
• Doctor On Demand – Delivering fast, easy, and cost-effective access to top healthcare providers.
• Starling Bank – Mobile banking for the next generation.
• VigLink – Powering content-driven commerce.

Make sure to also check out October’s Hot Startups if you missed it!

AwareLabs (Phoenix/Charlotte)
AwareLabs is a small, three person startup focused on helping business owners engage their customers through dozens of integrated applications. The startup was born in November 2011 and began as a website building guide that helped hundreds of entrepreneurs within its first few weeks. Early on, founder Paul Kenjora recognized that small businesses were being slowed down by existing business solutions, and in 2013 he took on the task of creating a business centric website builder. After attending an AWS seminar, Paul realized that small teams could design and deploy massive infrastructure just as well as heavily funded, high-tech companies. Previously, only big companies or heavy investment allowed for that type of scale. With the help of AwareLabs, small businesses with limited time and budgets can build the smart websites they need.

The AwareLabs team relies on AWS to achieve what was previously impossible with a team of their size. They’ve been able to raise less capital, move faster, and deliver a solution customers love. AwareLabs leverages Amazon EC2 extensively for everything from running client websites, to maintaining their own secure code repository. Amazon S3 has also been a game changer in offloading the burden of data storage and reliability. This was the single biggest factor in letting the AwareLabs development team focus on client-facing features instead of infrastructure issues. Amazon SES and Amazon SNS freed their developers to deliver integrated one-click newsletters with intelligent bounce reduction, which was very well received by clients. Finally, AWS has helped AwareLabs be profitable, which is huge for any startup!

Be sure to check out AwareLabs for your professional website needs!

Doctor On Demand (San Francisco)
Doctor On Demand was built to address the growing problem that many of those in the U.S. face – lack of access to healthcare providers. The average wait time to see a physician is three weeks, and in rural areas, it can be even longer. It takes an average of 25 days to see a psychiatrist or psychologist and nearly half of all patients with mental health issues go without treatment. With Doctor On Demand, patients can see a board-certified physician or psychologist in a matter of minutes directly from their smartphone, tablet, or computer. They can also have video visits with providers at any time of day – no matter where they are. Patients simply download the Doctor On Demand app (iOS and Android) or visit www.doctorondemand.com, provide a summary of the reason for their visit, and are connected to a licensed provider in their state. Services are delivered through hundreds of employers and work with dozens of major health plans.

From the very beginning, AWS has allowed Doctor on Demand to operate securely in the healthcare space. They utilize Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Trusted Advisor. With these services they are able to build compliant security and privacy controls, ‘simple’ fault tolerance, and easily setup a disaster recovery site (utilizing multiple AWS Regions). The company says the best part about working with AWS is that they are able to get everything they need on a startup budget.

Check out the Doctor On Demand blog to keep up with the latest news!

Starling Bank (UK)
Starling Bank is on a mission to shake up financial services.  In the way that TV was radically changed by Netflix, music by the likes of Spotify, and social media by Snapchat – this is what Starling aims to do for banking. Founded in 2014 by Anne Boden, Starling uses the latest technology to make the traditional current account obsolete. Having assembled a team of engineers, artists, and economists, the build of the bank is nearing completion. They will be launching their app in early 2017.

Many next generation banks continue to stick to the traditional bank model that was built on technology from the 1960s and 70s. Instead of providing a range of products that are sold and cross-sold to unwilling customers, Starling will empower their users through seamless access to a mobile marketplace of financial services and products that best meet their needs at any given time. Customers can enjoy the security and protection of a licensed and regulated bank while also getting access to insights, data, and services that empower them to make decisions about their money.

Starling Bank uses AWS to provision and scale a secure infrastructure automatically and on demand. They primarily use Amazon CloudFormation and Amazon EC2, but also make use of Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Lambda.

Sign up here to be one of Starling’s first customers!

VigLink (San Francisco)
Oliver Roup, founder and CEO of VigLink, was first introduced to affiliate marketing as a student at Harvard Business School. His interest in the complex ecosystem prompted him to write a crawler to identify existing product links to Amazon. Roup found that less than half of those links were enrolled in the associates program. It was at this moment that he determined there was a real business opportunity at hand, and VigLink was born.

Over the last seven years, the company has grown into not only a content monetization platform, but a platform that provides publishers and merchants with insights into their ecommerce business. At its core, VigLink identifies commercial product mentions within a publisher’s content and automatically transforms them into revenue generating hyperlinks whose destinations can be determined in real-time, advertiser-bid auctions. Since its founding in 2009, VigLink has been backed by top investors including Google Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, and RRE. Check out a recent interview with Roup and a tour of VigLink’s offices here!

Since the company’s start, VigLink has utilized AWS extensively. The flexibility to be able to respond to demand elastically without capital costs or hardware maintenance has been game-changing. They use numerous services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Redshift. While continuing to scale, VigLink has recently been able to cut costs by 15% using tools such as AWS Cost Explorer.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at VigLink in this short video.

—Tina Barr

I’m pleased to share yet another month of hot startups, courtesy of Tina Barr!

— Jeff;

Check out this month’s AWS-powered startups:

• Optimizely – Providing web and mobile A/B testing for the world’s leading brands.
• Touch Surgery – Building technologies for the global surgical community.
• WittyFeed – Creating viral content.

Optimizely (San Francisco)
Optimizely is one of the world’s leading experience optimization platforms, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization for leading brands. The platform’s easy-to-use products coupled with the high speed of deployment allows organizations to run experiments and make data-driven decisions. Thousands of customers worldwide are using Optimizely to deliver better experiences to their audiences across a variety of channels. To date, those customers have created and delivered over 275 billion optimized visitor experiences.

In today’s digital world, it is essential for companies to provide personalized experiences for their consumers. In Optimizely’s words, “Being personal is no longer optional.” Their web personalization products allow companies to deliver targeted content to their customers in real time by using browsing behavior, demographic information, contextual clues, and 1st- and 3rd-party data. This in turn drives revenue and keeps customers coming back. Companies don’t have to rely on a team of analysts or engineers to know the impact of their campaigns either – Optimizely has developed an industry-leading Stats Engine to support experimentation and decision-making on their terms.

Optimizely relies heavily on AWS for hosting core parts of its data infrastructure that powers experimentation across different channels, targeting and personalization. They use services like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon EMR, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon ElastiCache to rapidly and reliably scale out infrastructure for supporting business growth. Optimizely also uses AWS security services such as Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and AWS CloudTrail for auditing in order to enhance customer trust in the product.

Check out the Optimizely blog to keep up with the latest news!

Touch Surgery (London)
Founded by 4 surgeons, Touch Surgery is a technology startup with a mission to scale global surgery by using the latest technologies to train surgeons and standardize surgical knowledge. The company is transforming professional healthcare training through the delivery of a unique platform that links mobile apps with a powerful data back-end. The team behind Touch Surgery has spent years working with leading surgical minds from around the world to map and share the language of surgery.

Touch Surgery uses cognitive mapping techniques coupled with cutting edge AI and 3D rendering technology to codify surgical procedures. They have partnered with leaders in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to work toward a vision of advancing surgical care in the operating room (OR). Future surgeons can practice anytime, anywhere by downloading the app (iOS & Android). The app allows users to learn and practice over 50 surgical procedures, evaluate and measure progress, and connect with physicians across the world. Touch Surgery also offers a variety of simulations in specialties such as neurosurgery, orthopedics, plastics, and more.

Touch Surgery’s back-end is fully hosted on AWS. They make use of many Amazon EC2 instances, as well as Amazon S3 and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. AWS has allowed them to scale with the use of Amazon RDS, and they now have over 1 million users and are recording vast amounts of usage data to power their data analytics product. Touch Surgery is also able to deploy different environments with relative ease to help with testing and increase the speed of delivery.

Touch Surgery is always looking for more talent. For more info check out https://www.touchsurgery.com/jobs/.

WittyFeed (India)
WittyFeed is a platform connecting social media influencers with creative writers who have a passion for sharing entertaining and attention-grabbing stories. Launched in 2014 by cofounders Vinay Singhal (CEO), Shahshak Vaishnav (CTO), and Parveen Singhal (COO), WittyFeed has become India’s largest viral content company generating over 60 stories per day and attracting 75 million unique visitors every month. They have over 100 writers that are constantly producing content, and an in-house team of editors ensures that the content goes viral and reaches the right audience. The WittyFeed team is passionate about helping publishers grow their pages and is currently creating tools that will tell them not only when to post, but the type of content that will reach a broad audience.

WittyFeed is easy to use and allows readers to personalize their feeds to get the most relevant content. Their focus is on photo-stories, ‘listicles’, and ‘charticles’ in categories such as Technology, History, Sports, and of course, Hilarious. WittyFeed also makes it easy for users to engage and interact with each other with their new live-commenting feature, which allows readers to leave comments without having to sign into a personal account.

Being a content company means that WittyFeed has to deal with a heavy load, user base, and data. With AWS they are able to have a highly scalable infrastructure that can handle sudden surges and adapts to needs in a short period of time. WittyFeed uses a broad range of services including Amazon Kinesis Firehouse, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon RDS. These services allow WittyFeed to handle over 100 million visitors and serve over 500 million page views with almost zero downtime and have become the central pillars of their infrastructure.

Start exploring WittyFeed today!

— Tina Barr

Tina Barr is back with this month’s hot startups on AWS!

— Jeff;

It’s officially fall so warm up that hot cider and check out this month’s great AWS-powered startups:

• Funding Circle – The leading online marketplace for business loans.
• Karhoo – A ride comparison app.
• nearbuy – Connecting customers and local merchants across India.

Funding Circle (UK)
Funding Circle is one of the world’s leading direct lending platforms for business loans, where people and organizations can invest in successful small businesses. The platform was established in 2010 by co-founders Samir Desai, James Meekings, and Andrew Mullinger as a direct response to the noncompetitive lending market that exists in the UK. Funding Circle’s goal was to create the infrastructure – similar to a stock exchange or bond market – where any investor could lend to small businesses. With Funding Circle, individuals, financial institutions, and even governments can lend to creditworthy small businesses using an online direct lending platform. Since its inception, Funding Circle has raised $300M in equity capital from the same investors that backed Facebook, Twitter, and Sky. The platform expanded to the US market in October 2013 and launched across Continental Europe in October 2015.

Funding Circle has given businesses the ability to apply online for loans much faster than they could through traditional routes due in part to the absence of high overhead branch costs and legacy IT issues. Their investors include more than 50,000 individuals, the Government-backed British Business Bank, the European Investment Bank, and many local councils and large financial institutions. To date, more than £1.4 billion has been lent through the platform to nearly 16,000 small businesses in the UK alone. Funding Circle’s growth has led independent experts to predict that it will see strong growth in the UK business lending market within a decade. The platform has also made a huge impact in the UK economy – boosting it by £2.7 billion, creating up to 40,000 new jobs, and helping to build more than 2,000 new homes.

As a regulated business, Funding Circle needs separate infrastructure in multiple geographies. AWS provides similar services across all of Funding Circle’s territories. They use the full AWS stack from the top, with Amazon Route 53 directing traffic across global Amazon EC2 instances, to data analytics with Amazon Redshift.

Check out this short video to learn more about how Funding Circle works!

Karhoo (New York)
Daniel Ishag, founder and CEO of Karhoo, found himself in a situation many of us have probably been in. He was in a hotel in California using an app to call a cab from one of the big on-demand services. The driver cancelled. Daniel tried three or four different companies and again, they all cancelled. The very next day he was booking a flight when he saw all of the ways in which travel companies clearly presented airline choices for travelers. Daniel realized that there was great potential to translate this to ground transportation – specifically with taxis and licensed private hire. Within 48 hours of this realization, he was on his way to Bombay to prototype the product.

Karhoo is the global cab comparison and booking app that provides passengers with more choices each time they book a ride. By connecting directly to the fleet dispatch system of established black cab, minicab, and executive car operators, the app allows passengers to choose the ride they want, at the right price with no surge pricing. The vendor-neutral platform also gives passengers the ability to pre-book their rides days or months in advance. With over 500,000 cars on the platform, Karhoo is changing the landscape of the on-demand transport industry.

In order to build a scalable business, Karhoo uses AWS to implement many independent integration projects, run an operation that is data-driven, and experiment with tools and technologies without committing to heavy costs. They utilize Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon RDS for operation. Karhoo also uses Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon SES and is looking into future products such as a mobile device testing farm.

Check out Karhoo’s blog to keep up with their latest news!

nearbuy (India)
nearbuy is India’s first hyper-local online platform that gives consumers and local merchants a place to discover and interact with each other. They help consumers find some of the best deals in food, beauty, health, hotels, and more in over 30 cities in India. Here’s how to use them:

• Explore options and deals at restaurants, spas, gyms, movies, hotels and more around you.
• Buy easily and securely, using credit/debit cards, net-banking, or wallets.
• Enjoy the service by simply showing your voucher on the nearbuy app (iOS and Android).

After continuously observing the amount of time people were spending on their mobile phones, six passionate individuals decided to build a product that allowed for all goods and services in India to be purchased online. nearbuy has been able to make the time gap between purchase and consumption almost instant, make experiences more relevant by offering them at the user’s current location, and allow services such as appointments and payments to be made from the app itself. The nearbuy team is currently charting a path to define how services can and will be bought online in India.

nearbuy chose AWS in order to reduce its time to market while aggressively scaling their operations. They leverage Amazon ECS heavily and were one of the few companies in the region running their  entire production load on ECS. The container-based approach has not only helped nearbuy significantly reduce its infrastructure cost, but has also enabled them to implement CI+CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment), which has reduced time to ship exponentially.

Stay connected to nearbuy by following them at https://medium.com/@nearbuy.

— Tina Barr

Back with her second guest post, Tina Barr talks about four more hot startups!

— Jeff;

This month we are featuring four hot AWS-powered startups:

• Craftsvilla – Offering a platform to purchase ethnic goods.
• SendBird – Helping developers build 1-on-1 messaging and group chat quickly.
• Teletext.io – A solution for content management, without the system.
• Wavefront – A cloud-based analytics platform.

Craftsvilla
Craftsvilla was born in 2011 out of sheer love and appreciation for the crafts, arts, and culture of India. On a road trip through the Gujarat region of western India, Monica and Manoj Gupta were mesmerized by the beautiful creations crafted by local artisans. However, they were equally dismayed that these artisans were struggling to make ends meet. Monica and Manoj set out to create a platform where these highly skilled workers could connect directly with their consumers and reach a much broader audience. The demand for authentic ethnic products is huge across the globe, but consumers are often unable to find the right place to buy them. Craftsvilla helps to solve this issue.

The culture of India is so rich and diverse, that no one had attempted to capture it on a single platform. Using technological innovations, Craftsvilla combines apparel, accessories, health and beauty products, food items and home décor all in one easily accessible space. For instance, they not only offer a variety of clothing (Salwar suits, sarees, lehengas, and casual wear) but each of those categories are further broken down into subcategories. Consumers can find anything that fits their needs – they can filter products by fabric, style, occasion, and even by the type of work (embroidered, beads, crystal work, handcrafted, etc.). If you are interested in trying new cuisine, Craftsvilla can help. They offer hundreds of interesting products from masalas to traditional sweets to delicious tea blends. They even give you the option to filter through India’s many diverse regions to discover new foods.

Becoming a seller on Craftsvilla is simple. Shop owners just need to create a free account and they’re able to start selling their unique products and services. Craftsvilla’s ultimate vision is to become the ‘one-stop destination’ for all things ethnic. They look to be well on their way!

AWS itself is an engineer on Craftsvilla’s team. Customer experience is highly important to the people behind the company, and an integral aspect of their business is to attain scalability with efficiency. They automate their infrastructure at a large scale, which wouldn’t be possible at the current pace without AWS. Currently, they utilize over 20 AWS services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to name a few. Their app QA process will move to AWS Device Farm, completely automated in the cloud, on 250+ services thanks to Lambda. Craftsvilla relies completely on AWS for all of their infrastructure needs, from web serving to analytics.

Check out Craftsvilla’s blog for more information!

SendBird
After successfully exiting their first startup, SendBird founders John S. Kim, Brandon Jeon, Harry Kim, and Forest Lee saw a great market opportunity for a consumer app developer. Today, over 2,000 global companies such as eBay, Nexon, Beat, Malang Studio, and SK Telecom are using SendBird to implement chat and messaging capabilities on their mobiles apps and websites. A few ways companies are using SendBird:

• 1-on-1 messaging for private messaging and conversational commerce.
• Group chat for friends and interest groups.
• Massive scale chat rooms for live-video streams and game communities.

As they watched messaging become a global phenomenon, the SendBird founders realized that it no longer made sense for app developers to build their entire tech stack from scratch. Research from the Localytics Data Team actually shows that in-app messaging can increase app launches by 27% and engagement by 3 times. By simply downloading the SendBird SDK (available for iOS, Android, Unity, .NET Xamarin, and JavaScript), app and web developers can implement real-time messaging features in just minutes. SendBird also provides a full chat history and allows users to send chat messages in addition to complete file and data transfers. Moreover, developers can integrate innovative features such as smart-throttling to control the speed of messages being displayed to the mobile devices during live broadcasting.

After graduating from accelerator Y Combinator W16 Batch, the company grew from 1,000,000 monthly chat users to 5,000,000 monthly chat users within months while handling millions of new messages daily across live-video streaming, games, ecommerce, and consumer apps. Customers found value in having a cross-platform, full-featured, and whole-stack approach to a real-time chat API and SDK which can be deployed in a short period of time.

SendBird chose AWS to build a robust and scalable infrastructure to handle a massive concurrent user base scattered across the globe. It uses EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling, Route 53, S3, ElastiCache, Amazon Aurora, CloudFront, CloudWatch, and SNS. The company expects to continue partnering with AWS to scale efficiently and reliably.

Check out SendBird and their blog to follow their journey!

Teletext.io
Marcel Panse and Sander Nagtegaal, co-founders of Teletext.io, had worked together at several startups and experienced the same problem at each one: within the scope of custom software development, content management is a big pain. Even the smallest correction, such as a typo, typically requires a developer, which can become very expensive over time. Unable to find a proper solution that was readily available, Marcel and Sander decided to create their own service to finally solve the issue. Leveraging only the API Gateway, Lambda functions, Amazon DynamoDB, S3, and CloudFront, they built a drop-in content management service (CMS). Their serverless approach for a CMS alternative quickly attracted other companies, and despite intending to use it only for their own needs, the pair decided to professionally market their idea and Teletext.io was born.

Today, Teletext.io is called a solution for content management, without the system. Content distributors are able to edit text and images through a WYSIWYG editor without the help of a programmer and directly from their own website or user interface. There are just three easy steps to get started:

1. Include Teletext.io script.
2. Add data attributes.
3. Login and start typing.

That’s it! There is no system that needs to be installed or maintained by developers – Teletext.io works directly out of the box. In addition to recurring content updates, the data attribution technique can also be used for localization purposes. Making a website multilingual through a CMS can take days or weeks, but Teletext.io can accomplish this task in mere minutes. The time-saving factor is the main benefit for developers and editors alike.

Teletext.io uses AWS in a variety of ways. Since the company is responsible for the website content of others, they must have an extremely fast and reliable system that keeps website visitors from noticing external content being loaded. In addition, this critical infrastructure service should never go down. Both of these requirements call for a robust architecture with as few moving parts as possible. For these reasons, Teletext.io runs a serverless architecture that really makes it stand out. For loading draft content, storing edits and images, and publishing the result, the Amazon API Gateway gets called, triggering AWS Lambda functions. The Lambda functions store their data in Amazon DynamoDB.

Read more about Teletext.io’s unique serverless approach in their blog post.

Wavefront
Founded in 2013 and based in Palo Alto, Wavefront is a cloud-based analytics platform that stores time series data at millions of points per second. They are able to detect any divergence from “normal” in hybrid and cloud infrastructures before anomalies ever happen. This is a critical service that companies like Lyft, Okta, Yammer, and Box are using to keep running smoothly. From data scientists to product managers, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, Wavefront offers a powerful query engine and a language designed for everyone.

With a pay-as-you-go model, Wavefront gives customers the flexibility to start with the necessary application size and scale up/down as needed. They also include enterprise-class support as part of their pricing at no extra cost. Take a look at their product demos to learn more about how Wavefront is helping their customers.

The Wavefront Application is hosted entirely on AWS, and runs its single-tenant instances and multi-tenant instances in the virtual private cloud (VPC) clusters within AWS. The application has deep, native integrations with CloudWatch and CloudTrail, which benefits many of its larger customers also using AWS. Wavefront uses AWS to create a “software problem”, to operate, automate and monitor clouds using its own application. Most importantly, AWS allows Wavefront to focus on its core business – to build the best enterprise cloud monitoring system in the world.

To learn more about Wavefront, check out their blog post, How Does Wavefront Work!

— Tina Barr

Today I would like to introduce a very special guest blogger! My daughter Tina is a Recruiting Coordinator for the AWS team and is making her professional blogging debut with today’s post.

— Jeff;

It’s officially summer and it’s hot! Check out this month’s hot AWS-powered startups:

• Depop – a social mobile marketplace for artists and friends to buy and sell products.
• Nextdoor – building stronger and safer neighborhoods through technology.
• Branch – provides free deep linking technology for mobile app developers to gain and retain users.

Depop (UK)
In 2011, Simon Beckerman and his brother, Daniel, set out to create a social, mobile marketplace that would make buying and selling from mobile a fun and interactive experience. The Depop founders recognized that the rise of m-commerce was changing the way that consumers wanted to communicate and interact with each other. Simon, who already ran PIG Magazine and the luxury eyewear brand RetroSuperFuture, wanted to create a space where artists and creatives like himself could share, buy and sell their possessions. After launching organically in Italy, Depop moved to Shoreditch, London in 2012 to establish its headquarter and has since grown considerably with offices in London, New York, and Milan.

With over 4 million users worldwide, Depop is growing and building a community of shop owners with a passion for fashion, music, art, vintage, and lifestyle pieces. The familiar and user-friendly interface allows users to follow, like, comment, and private message with other users and shop owners. Simply download the app (Android or iOS) and you are suddenly connected to millions of unique items ready for purchase. It’s not just clothes either – you can find home décor, vintage furniture, jewelry, and more. Filtering by location allows you to personalize your feed and shop locally for even more convenience. Buyers can scroll through an endless stream of items ready for purchase and have the option to either pick up in-person or have their items shipped directly to them. Selling items is just as easy – upload a photo, write a short description, set a price, and then list your product.

Depop chose AWS in order to move fast without needing a large operations team, following a DevOps approach. They use 12 distinct AWS services including Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront for image hosting, and Auto Scaling to deal with the unpredictable and fairly large changes in traffic throughout the day. Depop’s developers are able to support their own services in production without needing to call on a dedicated operations team.

Check out Depop’s Blog to keep up with the artists using the app!

Nextdoor (San Francisco)
Based in San Francisco, Nextdoor has helped more than 100,000 neighborhoods across the United States bring their communities closer together. In 2010, the founders of this startup were surprised to learn from a Pew research study that the majority of American adults knew only some (29%) or none (28%) of their neighbors by name. Recognizing an opportunity to bring back a sense of community to neighborhoods across the country, the idea for Nextdoor was born. Neighbors are using Nextdoor to ask questions, get to know one another, and exchange local advice and recommendations. For example, neighbors are able to help one another to:

• Find trustworthy babysitters, plumbers, and dentists in the area.
• Organize neighborhood events, such as garage sales and block parties.
• Get assistance to find lost pets and missing packages.
• Sell or give away items, like an old kitchen table or bike.
• Report neighborhood crime and share safety concerns.

Nextdoor is also giving local agencies such as police and fire departments, and offices of emergency management the ability to connect with verified residents in their jurisdiction through a feature called Nextdoor for Public Agencies. This is incredibly beneficial for agencies to help residents with emergency preparedness, community engagement, crime prevention, and community policing. In his seminal work, Bowling Alone, Harvard Professor Robert Putnam learned that when social capital within a community is high, children do better in school, neighborhoods are safer, people prosper, the government is better, and people are happier and healthier overall. With a comprehensive list of helpful community guidelines, Nextdoor is creating stronger and safer neighborhoods with the power of technology. You can download the Nextdoor app for Android or iOS.

AWS  is the foundational infrastructure for both the online services in Nextdoor’s technology stack, and all of their offline data processing and analytics systems. Nextdoor uses over 25 different AWS services (Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Cloudfront, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Kinesis to name a few) to quickly prototype, develop, and deploy new features for community members. Supporting millions of users in the US, Nextdoor runs their services across four AWS Regions worldwide, and has also recently expanded to Europe. In their own words, “Amazon makes it easy for us to flexibly grow our technology footprint with predictable costs in an automated fashion.”

Branch (Palo Alto)
The idea for Branch came in May 2014 when a group of Stanford business school graduates began working together to build and launch their own mobile app. They soon realized how challenging it was to grow their app, and saw that many of their friends were running into the same difficulties. The graduates saw the potential to create a deep linking platform to help apps get discovered, retain users, and grow exponentially. Branch reached its first million users within several months after its inception, and a little over a year later had climbed to one billion users and 5,000 apps. Companies such as Pinterest, Instacart, Mint, and Redfin are partnering with Branch to improve their user experience worldwide. Over 11,000 apps use the platform today.

As the number of smartphone users continues to increase, mobile apps are providing better user experiences, higher conversions, and better retention rates than the mobile web. The issue comes when mobile developers want to link users to the content they worked so hard to create – the transition between emails, ads, referrals, and more can often lead to broken experiences.

Mobile deep links allow users to share content that is within an app. Normal web links don’t work unless apps are downloaded on a device, and even then there is no standard way to find and share content as it is specific to every app. Branch allows content within apps to be shared just as they would be on the web. For example, imagine you are shopping for a fresh pair of shoes on the mobile web. You are ready to check out, but are prompted to download the store’s app to complete your purchase. Now that you’ve downloaded the app, you are brought back to the store’s homepage and need to restart your search from the beginning. With a Branch deep link, you instead would be linked directly back to checkout once you’ve installed the app, saving time and creating an overall better user experience.

Branch has grown exponentially over the past two years, and relies heavily on AWS to scale its infrastructure. Anticipating continued growth, Branch builds and maintains most of its infrastructure services with open source tools running on Amazon EC2 instances (Amazon API Gateway, Apache Kafka, Apache Zookeeper, Kubernetes, Redis, and Aerospike), and also use AWS services such as Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. These services allow Branch to maintain a 99.999% success rate on links with a latency of only 60 ms in the 99th percentile. To learn more about how they did this, read their recent blog post, Scaling to Billions of Requests a Day with AWS.

— Tina Barr

Continuing with our focus on hot AWS-powered startups (March and April), I would like to tell you about three more this month:

• Shaadi.com – Helping South Asians to find a companion for life.
• Capillary – Boosting customer engagement for e-commerce.
• Mondo – A mobile-first bank.

Shaadi.com
Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com,  was exasperated by the way that marriages were arranged in India. Candidate photos and profiles were spread out on a coffee table and perused in hopes of finding a suitable life partner. He believed that this important, tradition-bound process could be improved, and created Shaadi.com, now one of the world’s largest matchmaking services and one of India’s best-known Internet brands.

Shaadi.com blends time-honored traditions (many going back centuries) with a progressive, consumer-oriented mindset. After having touched the lives of over 35 million people and helping over 4 million people to find their matches, they were recognized as one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world back in 2011.

In order to build a scalable business, Shaadi now runs its production infrastructure on AWS with the assistance of a lean DevOps team. They currently make use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), and Amazon ElastiCache, with plans to make use of additional managed services in the future. They host their corporate data warehouse on Amazon Redshift and use it to drive all of their reporting and analytics.

Capillary
Back in 2008, the founders of Capillary began to work with retailers to create loyalty programs that were centered around mobile phone numbers. As they did this, they realized that many of the retailers were saddled with traditional, on-premises CRM systems that were not amenable to modernization. The founders stepped in to fill this gap with the goal of creating a cutting-edge customer engagement suite that ran on a multi-tenant cloud-powered platform.

Over the intervening years the solution has grown to encompass CRM, loyalty, e-commerce, customer analytics, and O2O (online-to-offline) commerce. Capillary now connects 150 million shoppers to over 20,000 stores and more than 250 e-commerce implementations across 30 countries, with a focus on driving excellence in online and traditional retail.

Capillary now runs in 5 distinct AWS regions. The architecture is based on microservices and runs on top of EC2, S3, Auto Scaling, Amazon EMR, and ElastiCache, with a focus on security, availability, and scalability (read the Capillary Tech Blog to learn more about how they address these requirements using AWS).

Mondo
Starting with the goal of “building the best bank on the planet,” the team behind UK-based Mondo decided to address the needs of mobile-first users. These users prefer to do their banking via mobile phone instead of in person or on a desktop.  In addition to traditional banking functions, the resulting mobile app can track spending in real time, display geolocated transactions on a map, view spending by category, send money to other users in peer-to-peer fashion, and interact with loyalty programs.  Behind the scenes, the app makes uses of the Mondo API to interact with the actual banking functions.

The founders chose AWS in order to build a scalable and highly reliable system. They practice account separation (distinct accounts for dev, test, staging, and production) and follow the infrastructure-as-code discipline. Because banking is a regulated business, Mondo uses AWS CloudHSM to sign and cryptographically ensure the integrity of payment messages. They use VPCs and Network ACLs to isolate disparate functions and to manage the scope of regulated activities.

— Jeff;

Continuing with our focus on hot AWS-powered startups (see Hot Startups on AWS – March 2016 for more info), this month I would like to tell you about:

• Robinhood – Free stock trading to democratize access to financial markets.
• Dubsmash – Bringing joy to communication through video.
• Sharethrough – An all-in-one native advertising platform.

Robinhood
The founders of Robinhood graduated from Stanford and then moved to New York to build trading platforms for some of the largest financial institutions in the world. After seeing that these institutions charged investors up to $10 to place trades that cost almost nothing, they moved back to California with the goal of democratizing access to the markets and empowering personal investors.

Starting with the idea that a technology-driven brokerage could operate with significantly less overhead than a traditional firm, they built a self-serve service that allows customers to sign up in less than 4 minutes. To date, their customers have transacted over 3 billion dollars while saving over $100 million dollars in commissions.

After a lot of positive pre-launch publicity, Robinhood debuted with a waiting list of nearly a million people. Needless to say, they had to pay attention to scale from the very beginning. Using 18 distinct AWS services, a beginning team of just two DevOps people built the entire system. They use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to regulate access to services and to data, simplifying their all-important compliance efforts. The Robinhood data science team uses Amazon Redshift to help identify possible instances of fraud and money laundering. Next on the list is international expansion, with plans to make use of multiple AWS Regions.

Dubsmash
The founders of Dubsmash had previously worked together to create several video-powered applications. As the cameras in smartphones continued to improve, they saw an opportunity to create a platform that would empower people to express themselves visually. Starting simple, they built their first prototype in a couple of hours. The functionality was minimal: play a sound, select a sound, record a video, and share. The initial response was positive and they set out to build the actual product.

The resulting product, Dubsmash, allows users to combine video with popular sound bites and to share the videos online – with a focus on modern messaging apps. The founders began working on the app in the summer of 2014 and launched the first version the following November. Within a week it reached the top spot in the German App Store. As often happens, early Dubsmash users have put the app to use in intriguing and unanticipated ways. For example, Eric Bruce uses Dubsmash to create entertaining videos of him and his young son Jack to share with Priscilla (Eric’s wife / Jack’s mother) (read Watch A Father and His Baby Son Adorably Master Dubsmash to learn more).

Dubsmash uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for video storage, with content served up through Amazon CloudFront.  They have successfully scaled up from their MVP and now handle requests from millions of users. To learn more about their journey, read their blog post, How to Serve Millions of Mobile Clients with a Single Core Server.

Sharethrough
Way back in 2008, a pair of Stanford graduate students were studying the concept of virality and wanted to create ads that would deserve your attention rather than simply stealing it. They created Sharethrough, an all-in-one native advertising platform for publishers, app developers, and advertisers. Today the company employs more than 170 people and serves over 3 billion native ad impressions per month.

Sharethrough includes a mobile-first content-driven platform designed to engage users with quality content that is integrated into the sites where it resides. This allows publishers to run premium ads and to maintain a high-quality user experience. They recently launched an AI-powered guide that helps to maximize the effectiveness of ad headlines.

Sharethrough’s infrastructure is hosted on AWS, where they make use of over a dozen high-bandwidth services including Kinesis and Dynamo, for the scale of the technical challenges they face. Relying on AWS allows them to focus on their infrastructure-as-code approach, utilizing tools like Packer and Terraform for provisioning, configuration and deployment. Read their blog post (Ops-ing with Packer and Terraform) to learn more.

— Jeff;

We love startups!

When energy, enthusiasm, creativity, and passion for changing the world come together to build new and exciting businesses and applications, everyone benefits. Today I am kicking off a new series of posts. Every month I am going to feature a handful of hot, AWS-powered startups and tell you a little bit about what they built. I hope to explore a bit of the motivation behind the products and the startups and to show you how AWS has empowered them to put that energy, enthusiasm, creativity, and passion to use.

Today’s post features the following startups:

• Intercom – One place for every team in an Internet business to see and talk
• to customers, personally, at scale.
• Tile – A popular key locator product that works with an app to help people find their stuff.
• Bugsnag – A tool to capture and analyze runtime errors in production web & mobile applications.
• DroneDeploy – Making the sky productive and accessible for everyone.

Intercom
The founders of Intercom previously ran a SaaS business in Dublin, Ireland. They had a problem- they didn’t know who their customers were, and couldn’t easily communicate with them. They were working on a solution when they observed a coffee shop owner casually interacting with his customers, greeting them by name, making offers tailored to their interests, addressing questions, and heading off potential problems. The founders decided to build a tool that would allow others building online businesses to have a personal touch with their customers, as opposed to simply treating them like rows in a database.

The resulting platform, Intercom, is a fundamentally new way to communicate with customers. It allows web and mobile businesses to track live customer data, and use that data to communicate with customers in a personal way on their website, inside web and mobile apps, and by email. A little bit of JavaScript (for web apps) or simple SDKs for (iOS and Android) powers live chat, marketing automation, customer feedback, and customer support.

Intercom chose AWS to allow them to move fast without having to have a large operations team. With thousands of businesses already using the product, they needed to keep the real-time conversations running at a consistent speed and with low latency. When they anticipated running up against the limits of their existing relational database and began to consider a sharded solution, they put Amazon Aurora to the test and found that it was able to handle their current load, with plenty of room to grow. They avoided the complexity of sharding, lowered their costs, and reduced the latency of their queries.

Tile
One of the founders of Tile was frustrated because his spouse had a habit of losing things. After looking in to some ways to help her, he realized two things. First, this was a very common problem (and, to be fair, one that is not gender-specific). Second, no one was addressing it. Seeing an opportunity, he co-founded Tile in 2013 and created a crowdfunding campaign to secure capital. This campaign surpassed the initial goal of 10,000 units by 20x, which delivered a key indicator that the team had found a good solution to an unmet need. Currently, the company has sold over 4.5 million Tiles, making this one of the most successful crowdfunded companies to date.

The Tiles themselves are small and simple. They can be attached to all different sorts of objects, and use Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate. When the mobile app is activated, it displays a proximity radar with range of about 100 feet, and the app can also be used to trigger a loud (90 decibel) chime on the Tile. Conversely, the Tile itself can be used to find a missing smartphone. The app can even display the last known location of each Tile on a built-in map; this is useful if the Tile is out of Bluetooth range. Finally, if the misplaced item is well and truly lost, a community-based feature can be used to provide an anonymous ping if another user’s running app comes within Bluetooth range of the missing item. Based on these functionality options, Tile is ideal for finding anything that can be lost or misplaced, from lost keys, remote controls, cell phones, and other high-value objects, large or small.

Tile chose AWS to allow them to scale rapidly and to have a global presence (they have devices in 214 countries & territories). They run multiple applications (the Tile Web App, Customer Service, and the Tile Network) on AWS using EC2, Route 53, RDS, CloudWatch, SNS, Kinesis, and Redshift. They currently process over 100 million location updates every day and regularly add new servers, modify load balancers, and update DNS entries.

Bugsnag
This hot startup was founded in a tiny San Francisco apartment that was home to Simon and James (the two founders), their respective partners, and a four-pack of cats. They wanted to provide developers of web and mobile applications with a tool that would intercept, track, and report on application crashes with an eye toward aggregated, prioritized reporting and analysis. Given the fragmented state of the mobile device world, being able to use Bugsnag to identify issues that are peculiar to one platform, device, or version ensures that developers are focused on fixing bugs that affect the most users.

Bugsnag helps thousands of companies to improve the quality of their web and mobile applications. It integrates with many languages and environments including Rails, JavaScript, Python, Go, PHP, iOS, and Android. The product captures detailed crash data, packages it up for analysis (including an encryption step), and then uploads the information to AWS where it can be used to create tickets, issue notification to tools like HipChat and Slack, and so forth. Bugsnag also includes a dashboard that supports analysis of trends over time, data-driven root cause analysis, and multiple key/value filters.

The load on Bugsnag depends on the applications shipped by their customers and can vary greatly from day to day. They currently process up to a billion crashes per day. In order to handle this large, unpredictable load as economically as possible they make use of a multitude of AWS services including a mix of On-Demand and Spot instances. Their worker fleet is comprised of a mix of both kinds of instances, managed by a pair of Auto Scaling groups. The first group contains the Spot instances. It scales up aggressively and scales down slowly. The second group contains the On-Demand instances. It scales up conservatively and scales down aggressively.  To learn more about how they did this, read their blog post, Responsive infrastructure with Auto Scaling.

DroneDeploy
In 2013, three entrepreneurs in South Africa got together to plan a new venture. After observing that off-the-shelf drone hardware was maturing far more rapidly than the software needed to get the most value out of that hardware, they started DroneDeploy. Their vision was to make the sky productive and accessible to everyone. They wanted to remove complexity in order to allow companies to operate fleets of drones safely, reliably, and simply. They also wanted to give their customers the ability to process the data collected by the drones.

They launched the first version of their code in 2014. Since then they have attracted customers in industries as diverse as construction, agriculture, surveying, and mining (many interesting stories can be found on the DroneDeploy Blog). Here are a few examples:

• A customer in Mexico processed 1000 km of road imagery in just 3 weeks (114,043 images / 8 terabytes of data).
• A potato farmer in North Dakota mapped a 150 acre field, processed the data (30 minutes), and evaluated crop damage.
• A construction manager in Oklahoma used DroneDeploy to monitor the construction of oil tanks and pipelines, producing 3D models in the process.

DroneDeploy is processing images from 100 countries into interactive maps and 3D models. They host their core infrastructure on AWS. They make heavy use of EC2 for image processing and S3 for storage (multiple petabytes). The image processing fleet is auto scaled up and down based on the number and priority of jobs, spread out across multiple Availability Zones.

— Jeff;

As I promised earlier this year, the AWS Pop-up Loft is reopening on Wednesday, October 1^st in San Francisco with a full calendar of events designed to help developers, architects, and entrepreneurs learn about and make use of AWS.

Come to the AWS Loft and meet 1:1 with an AWS technical expert, learn about AWS in detailed product sessions, and gain hands-on experience through our instructor-led Technical Bootcamps and our self-paced hands-on labs. Take a look at the Schedule of Events to learn more about what we have planned.

Hours and Location
The AWS Loft will be open Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 6 PM, with special evening events that will run until 8 PM. It is located at 925 Market Street in San Francisco.

Special Events
We are also setting up a series of events with AWS-powered startups and partners from the San Francisco area. The list is still being finalized but already includes cool companies like Runscope (Automated Testing for APIs and Backend Services), NPM (Node Package Manager), Circle CI (Continuous Integration and Deployment), Librato (Metrics, Monitoring, and Alerts), CoTap (Secure Mobile Messaging for Businesses), and Heroku (Cloud Application Platform).

A Little Help From Our Friends
AWS and Intel share a passion for innovation, along with a track record of helping startups to be successful. Intel will demonstrate the latest technologies at the AWS Loft, including products that support the Internet of Things and the newest Xeon processors. They will also host several talks.

The folks at Chef are also joining forces with the AWS Loft and will be bringing their DevOps expertise to the AWS Loft through hosted sessions and a training curriculum. You’ll be able to learn about the Chef product — an automation platform for deploying and configuring IT infrastructure and applications in the data center and in the Cloud.

Watch This!
In order to get a taste for the variety of activities and the level of excitement you’ll find at the AWS Loft, watch this short video:

Come Say Hello
I will be visiting and speaking at the AWS Loft in late October and hope to see and talk to you there!

— Jeff;