As the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem and on track to become its third-largest economy, India offers unparalleled opportunities. Home to visionary entrepreneurs and trailblazing innovators, the nation’s vibrant landscape pulses with transformative ideas. In the season finale, we celebrate India’s dynamic entrepreneurial spirit and its remarkable boundless potential for change.
The “Crafting Bharat – Season 2” powered by AWS Startups, an initiative by NewsReach, in association
with VCCircle, and production partner – HT Smartcast, explores how startups are
harnessing the power of the cloud to accelerate growth, optimise operations,
and building solutions that will define the India of Tomorrow. This
series is hosted by Gautam Srinivasan, famed for hosting a diverse range of TV
and digital programs, currently consulting editor at CNBC (India), CNN-News18,
Forbes India, and The Economic Times.
In this episode, we spotlight Goutam Kurumella,
Head of Startup Solutions Architecture at AWS India, shares insights about
how AWS is helping startups accelerate innovation, AWS’s flagship programs and
the power of technology to change the future of India.
In this series, explore inspiring startup
stories that are shifting gears and sparking innovation across sectors, all
contributing to India’s transformation into a developed nation by 2047 in this
captivating series.
Watch Episode: https://youtu.be/Uz8MKpw0UJE
Edited Excerpts:
How do the key announcements from re:Invent
2024—especially the next-gen Amazon SageMaker—help Indian startups address
scale complexities in analytics, integration, business apps, and Gen AI to
drive growth toward India’s 2047 goals?
re:Invent 2024 brought a host of exciting
announcements, many of which are highly relevant for startups in India. One
standout is the advancement in Amazon SageMaker, which I’d place
under the “simplification” category. In Indian startups, we often see different
teams—data engineering, ML, GenAI—working in silos, even though they rely on
the same data. What SageMaker now enables is a unified, simplified
interface, allowing these teams to collaborate on a common platform. This
not only accelerates experimentation but also reduces costs and complexity by
eliminating the need for multiple environments.
From an innovation standpoint, the
launch of Amazon Nova: Generative Foundational Models is a
game-changer. These models provide startups access to powerful LLMs with
industry-leading price-performance and extremely low latency. Customers are
already leveraging them for complex use cases with impressive results.
Finally, looking at it from an
India-specific lens—India is a nation of developers. The updates to Amazon
Q Developer is particularly exciting. With built-in agents that assist with
coding, debugging, security scans, code reviews, and even documentation
generation, developer productivity gets a massive boost.
AWS also started a fintech accelerator
programme called InFINity 2.0. How do you see the innovation landscape in the
fintech space evolving as it has matured a lot over the past 5 years?
InFINity 2.0 has seen tremendous
success in attracting high-quality startups making meaningful impact. Startups
like BriskPe, India Gold, and Vayana from the previous cohort are great
examples. This year, we’re witnessing a shift—startups are moving beyond basic
digitization to tackle more complex areas like embedded finance, personalized
wealth management, and Insurtech, among others.
DeepSeek-R1, which hit the headlines recently,
is now available as a fully managed model in Amazon Bedrock, freeing up teams
to focus on strategic initiatives instead of managing infrastructure
complexities. Take us through how this move will enable Indian startups to
accelerate innovation?
DeepSeek-R1 is now available on
Amazon Bedrock as a fully managed model service, which means startups can
simply consume it via API—no need to set up complex infrastructure or worry
about resource planning, throughput, or security. Amazon Bedrock takes care of
all that, making it easy for startups to access and leverage a cutting-edge
model like DeepSeek-R1 with speed and simplicity.
As the narrative has shifted from startups
chasing pure growth to solving for profitability, how is AWS enabling Indian
startups to raise their efficiency and in turn profitability quotient?
There are several important steps startups
can take today, and as you mentioned, adopting modern technologies and
frameworks—especially concepts like Agentic AI—is incredibly powerful. For
example, startups like Oriserve have leveraged Amazon Bedrock to build
enterprise-grade generative AI bots and agents. This not only helped them
deliver better solutions to their customers but also drove over 50% business
growth. These technologies have unlocked capabilities that simply weren’t
possible before.
Additionally, we introduced Amazon
EKS Auto, which is a game-changer for startups. It allows them to run
application workloads efficiently while staying focused on building their core
business applications. With automated resource management, cluster upgrades,
auto-scaling, and versioning—plus built-in security and compliance
support—startups can ensure their infrastructure is enterprise-ready. This is
especially valuable when serving regulated industries like banking or telecom,
where compliance is critical.
What are some lessons on running a startup
that you would like to share with the budding founders, many of whom could be
helming the next big thing in Indian business?
Three key lessons stand out for
running a startup: be deeply customer-obsessed and build what truly solves
their needs; think big but start small by breaking goals into actionable steps;
and always keep learning and adapting to fast-changing market, tech, and
regulatory landscapes.
India’s startup ecosystem has seen
remarkable growth over the past decade, driven by rapid technological adoption
and urbanization. Through a broad range of AWS services, we’re empowering
visionary founders to build more efficiently, innovate faster, and scale with
confidence.
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