How Dawn Capital and AWS collaborate to support startups as they scale

Dawn Capital is Europe’s largest B2B investor, managing $3b of Assets Under Management (AUM). Shamillah Bankiya, a Partner at the fund, estimates that ~80 percent of its portfolio companies are AWS Partners. AWS has helped many of these organizations scale their businesses with a broad portfolio of solutions and services, including getting started with AWS Activate Credits.

Dawn Capital and AWS share a commitment to supporting startups and helping founders navigate common challenges, so they can dedicate more time to building the most differentiated parts of their businesses.

For Shamillah, one of the most important decisions founders make early on is choosing a technology partner that can scale with the business. “We see a lot of people run into technical debt extremely early on because they make the wrong choice about the scale that's required from their partner,” says Bankiya. “So that mindfulness about where am I going and what do I need to build, versus what can I happily buy from someone, is important.”

For many of the startups Dawn Capital works with, AWS is the technology partner of choice. AWS combines scalable infrastructure and a broad range of services with dedicated startup initiatives and funding, giving founders access to the technology and financial resources they need as their businesses grow. Furthermore, Bankiya says, “AWS has exceptional relationships with technology leaders. As such, many of my portfolio companies have partnered with AWS to unlock strategic accounts globally.”

Supporting the startup journey

As startups grow, they face new infrastructure challenges, such as AI inference. “We're still early in the journey when it comes to inference,” says Bankiya. “I'm curious to see what comes out of the hardware lab around getting to even lower costs, even lower latency for a bunch of use cases that I think are probably uneconomical to run today.” She highlights the potential of AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium, AWS-designed chips that help make machine learning workloads more cost-effective. “I'm super excited to see how these chips help startups tackle cost and affordability challenges and enable them to launch a significant amount of new use cases.”

Many of the startups Dawn Capital works with have also participated in AWS initiatives, including AWS Activate. For early-stage companies, Bankiya says, AWS Activate Credits can make it easier to get started with AWS, helping them experiment and build without having to take on the full cost of their technology infrastructure from day one. As these companies grow, that early relationship can provide a foundation for continuing to work with AWS. Dawn Capital also dedicates time and resources to helping the wider startup community, taking part in programs like the AWS Fintech Accelerator and, more recently, AWS Summit London, where Bankiya joined a panel discussion in the AWS Startup Zone.

Bankiya points to Dawn Capital portfolio company Ably as an example of how AWS infrastructure is helping startups deliver innovative solutions. Most AI applications rely on short-lived connections that close when users switch devices or their network drops. With AI Transport, Ably delivers durable sessions that stay open past the initial connection, enabling AI agents to continue working when the user leaves and return where the agent left off. By building its platform on AWS, Ably has scaled its real-time messaging layer to handle billions of messages every day with enterprise-grade reliability.

Driving business value

Much of Bankiya’s time is spent working with founders to address the unique challenges they face as they build their businesses. Knowing when to build, how to access funding, who to talk to, and what to do next helps founders focus their time and resources on the areas that will have the greatest impact.

The relationship AWS has with both Dawn Capital and the wider startup community is just as important as the technology and services it provides. “I work with [AWS] people on a day-to-day basis and that relationship allows me to have a sense of exactly what products AWS is shipping and make mutually beneficials connections between AWS and the startups I work with,” says Bankiya. “That relationship component, alongside an extremely high-quality product, makes [AWS] the de facto choice.”