Support of all kinds is crucial for fledgling startups to progress from being fleeting ideas to thriving technology businesses. In the ongoing growth story of the Filipino live-streaming platform Kumu, cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) features as a constant backer.
In an online briefing on Thursday, Aug. 29, representatives from Kumu and AWS shared how the AWS’ Activate program provided support at critical stages during Kumu’s development to help the startup save on costs while getting off the ground, deliver seamless customer experience, and more recently, shift towards profitability.
AWS Activate is AWS’ flagship program for startups and one of its primary functions is to provide free credits to promising businesses all over the world. Through this program, qualified startups can be equipped with anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 worth of credits to experiment, leverage, and hopefully scale through AWS’ broad range of technology tools.
Roland Ros, Kumu founder and CEO, began the briefing by describing how AWS Activate’s free credits enabled them to capitalize on timing and pull through the early, lean stage of startup development.
“The combination of an affordable smartphone, billions of dollars in Internet infrastructure, and a young market actually created an opportunity for someone to build on top of this mobile Internet,” Ros said.
“So, when you see that combination, you decide to go all in but you don’t really have resources. AWS is very critical to be able to actually [make use of the opportunity and] get businesses off the ground.”
As Kumu advanced past this stage, however, the other facets of Activate’s credits came into play. Instead of being applied directly to AWS’ technology products and services, Activate’s credits can be employed by start-ups to consult with cloud engineers who will aid in figuring out the AWS services most suited to their business.
When the pandemic descended and millions of app downloads worldwide inaugurated Kumu’s growth stage, AWS assisted Kumu’s team in designing the best cloud architecture to scale their operations as customers suddenly flooded the livestreaming platform.
Kumu specifically availed of AWS services like Redis to ensure timely content delivery and seamless user experience by enabling high-quality streaming, video chat, and interactive features that caught and kept the attention of their global Filipino audience.
In particular, Ros highlighted the platform’s real-time, interactive gifts experience supported by Redis. Through this Kumu feature, viewers can send livestreamers virtual gifts as they’re watching these live videos. These gifts can later on be converted to real cash.
“And if we didn’t have AWS, I don’t know how we would be able to actually launch, in essence, what I would say is this social media version of television for our community of millions of Filipinos around the world… If AWS wasn’t there for us, again, just imagine the cost of building all these servers and trying to do this on your own. We wouldn’t have been able to do that,” Ros reflected.
Now, as the frantic pace of the growth stage settles into the pursuit of sustainable profit for Kumu, AWS’ Activate program remains a valuable resource that helps Kumu optimize by increasing the yield of their technology resource use as well as explore new technology’s potential.
Priya Lakshmi, AWS head of startup in Asean, spoke during the briefing to expound on Activate’s role beyond credits “Activate is [often] considered as a credits program only, but it’s actually beyond that,” Lakshmi pointed out.
“AWS Activate has evolved into a one-stop shop for startups, offering really comprehensive self-service business and technical content, and things that startups want to learn about, whether it’s fundraising, legal guidance, technical documentation, like what is the solution architecture should look like, even about latest technologies like generative AI (gen AI),” Lakshmi explained.
In fact, gen AI is one of the relatively new technologies that AWS is helping startups maximize to automate their operations and innovate new features on their platform.
Ros recounted a recent AWS summit in Singapore called “Meeting of the Minds,” which taught CEOs and startup founders about where they could integrate Gen AI into their businesses.
Lakshmi added: “Our goal is to make things easier, better, faster, and cheaper for our customers. And just like how we speak about democratizing cloud computing for our customers, we’re also working on democratizing generative AI.”
AWS’ continuous support throughout Kumu’s growth hints that there is space for cloud companies to be more than technology providers to startups. By keeping in touch with startup needs and even offering services outside of technology to meet these businesses at different points in their development, cloud providers can transform from technology suppliers to revelant, long-lasting partners for these fledgling companies.
“Just going through this whole journey from the very beginning when we were in our little condo to when we were hiring hundreds of people at a time to now being profitable, it’s been a journey and a partnership, a really deep relationship with AWS that I really appreciate,” Ros concluded.
