Goutam Kurumella, Head of Startup Solutions Architecture at AWS India, on how AWS is helping startups accelerate innovation, AWS’s flagship programs and power of technology.
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.
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 Oryza 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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