Startups & Innovation

Key concepts

1. 1
   Build-measure-learn loops and lean architecture
2. 2
   Serverless-first patterns to keep COGS low
3. 3
   Multi-tenant SaaS isolation models
4. 4
   Going from MVP to product-market-fit on AWS
5. 5
   AWS Activate, Marketplace, and ISV co-sell

Key AWS services

• AWS Amplify
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Bedrock
• AWS Activate

Learn more — curated resources

Hand-picked official docs, foundational papers, and the best community guides for going deeper on this topic.

• AWS Activate for Startups
• AWS SaaS Factory
• AWS Startup Blog

Sessions on this topic

6 sessions from the Summit covered this topic. Each is a self-contained mini-lesson.

1. STP201Intermediate

   Scaling Security at Startup Speed: Hnry's AI-Powered Approach

   Hnry, a fast-growing fintech startup, faced a critical challenge: their lean engineering team lacked capacity for thorough security reviews and penetration testing. Traditional solutions like hiring security specialists or engaging consulting firms would compromise their velocity and budget. By adopting AWS Security Agent, Hnry gained enterprise-grade security capabilities without enterprise overhead. The AI-powered tool integrated into their development workflow, providing real-time security feedback, automated design reviews, and on-demand penetration testing. This enabled Hnry to maintain startup speed while achieving robust security posture, proving small teams can deliver enterprise-level security through intelligent automation.

2. ISV301Advanced

   Rolling to Scale: Roller's Multi-Tenant SaaS platform on AWS

   Learn how Roller Software grew from an Australian startup into a global venue management platform serving 3,000 venues across 30 countries and delivering 120 million experiences annually. Using AWS multi-tenant architecture, Roller maintains 99.99% uptime while processing $4 billion in transactions each year through their modern monolith application. This session covers practical strategies for tenant isolation, infrastructure scaling, and enterprise-grade security. Youll discover how to leverage AWSs native multi-tenant capabilities and get a proven roadmap for scaling your SaaS business from startup to enterprise while keeping costs efficient and operations excellent.

3. STP213Intermediate

   AI-Powered Farming: How Halter's ML Models Transform Dairy Operations

   New Zealand Unicorn agritech startup Halter is revolutionizing dairy farming with AI-powered smart collars that predict critical livestock events. Their machine learning models enable heat detection, calving prediction, pasture optimization, and animal behavior classification, processing data from thousands of GPS-enabled collars across remote farms. By leveraging AWS infrastructure, Halter's engineering team built scalable ML pipelines that help farmers make data-driven decisions, reduce labor costs, and improve animal welfare. Learn how Halter developed production ML models for agriculture, overcame challenges of training on livestock data, and their journey toward managed ML services.

4. STP101Foundational

   Driving Profitable Growth with Generative AI: From Prompt to Product

   Generative AI is the largest disruption to software company business models since the emergence of SaaS. In this workshop we'll cover best practices software companies use to take AI-native products from pilot to production, including identifying use cases that drive business value, features that accelerate adoption and pricing strategies that result in profitable growth. This will include an interactive session - so bring your ideas and collaborate with other startups to help find generative AI features that add value to your product

5. STP216Intermediate

   Building AI Agents: From Open-Source Frameworks to Production-Grade

   AI agents are moving from demo to deployment. Startups across ANZ are building production-grade assistants using open-source orchestration frameworks, fine-tuned foundation models, and GPU-accelerated inference on AWS and NVIDIA infrastructure. This panel explores what it actually takes to ship agentic use casesfrom choosing the right models and frameworks to managing latency, cost, and reliability at scale. We'll hear from AirTree VC on where the investment thesis is heading, from NVIDIA on how accelerated compute is shaping the agent stack, and from Heidi Health building and scaling these systems in production. Whether it's vertical agents for healthcare, customer support, or code generation, we'll focus on what's working, what's hype, and where the real startup opportunities lie in the agent ecosystem.

6. STP202Intermediate

   Stop Vibing, Start Shipping: How Startups Build with Kiro

   Prompt-and-pray development doesn't scale. Learn how startup engineering teams are adopting Kiro's spec-driven, agentic approach to go from requirements to working code on AWS with real adoption patterns, pitfalls, and measurable productivity impact.

One sharp, contrarian insight per session — the things teams don't think of unprompted.

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