Made in Boston: Home-grown talent inspires world-changing innovations

From prestigious academic and research institutions to a rich history of innovation and entrepreneurship, Boston has earned a reputation as a hub of world-changing discoveries. Find out why startup founders are choosing the city as their home base, how AWS is supporting their growth, and how AWS Activate is helping them reduce costs while building and scaling quickly.

Boston’s heritage as a major technology hub dates back to the founding of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During the mid-twentieth century, the Route 128 Corridor became a center for innovation in electronics, computing, and pioneering companies that helped shape the digital age. Following the rise of Silicon Valley, Boston reinvented itself as a global leader in healthcare, life sciences, AI, and enterprise software. Today, it continues to bring together diverse global communities through its world-famous education gateways.

The AWS tour of global startup hubs lands in Boston following stops in London, New York, San Francisco, and Seoul. Here, founders from five Boston-based startups discuss why they chose the city as their home base, their experiences of working with AWS, and how the startup ecosystem has impacted their growth journey.

Planting strong roots

Choosing where to build is one of the most important decisions a startup founder makes, impacting how they access funding and talent as well as the company’s culture. For the founders we spoke to, there was no question about where they wanted to begin their journey. “I think of Boston as kind of the intellectual capital of the United States,” says Gevorg Grigoryan, Co-founder and CTO of Generate:Biomedicines, which uses machine learning to reimagine how therapeutics are made. He continues: “When it came to where we’d make our home base, there wasn’t really any second in my mind.”

Jack MacGeachie, VP of Revenue at Blitzy, which has built an autonomous software development platform, voices a similar sentiment: “Our founders started their journey together at Harvard Business School and decided to stay in the city to recruit exceptional technical and go-to-market talent.” For Elias Torres, CEO and Co-founder of Agency, a company that builds autonomous AI agents to support customer management, Boston’s appeal comes from a shared mindset: “The people are focused on innovating and really making a mark in the world.”

Today’s startups know that regional locales are just one piece of the puzzle. Choosing the technical foundations for their business is an equally important decision for founders, impacting how quickly it can build, grow, and bring products to market. For our founders, AWS has provided a robust technical foundation.

Driving growth through collaboration

“AWS has been with us since the beginning, and it has helped us go from experimentation to production very quickly,” says Armin Ghobadi, Co-founder of Systalyze, a company that has built a SaaS platform for launching and optimizing AI workloads. Systalyze utilizes Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for compute and storage respectively, as well as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Generate:Biomedicines has also been with AWS since it was founded: “Early on, it was just immediate access to compute, then it became storage, so it’s been a progression of different types of support that we’ve seen over the years,” explains Grigoryan. The support Grigoryan references is an important point for our startups, especially 7AI, which builds autonomous AI agents to investigate and action cybersecurity alerts. Its Founder and CEO, Lior Div, explains: “AWS was the first call I made, and the level of support we got from day zero was second to none.”

That support extends to startup-specific funding, such as AWS Activate Credits that help them build and scale faster. “It’s just a no-brainer at the beginning,” says Torres. He continues: “It allows you to focus on your MVP, product market fit, and getting your first customers, and not worry about how much it costs to spin up a server or service.” In Generate:Biomedicines’ case, speed was a crucial benefit: “The AWS Activate Credits enabled us to very quickly scale up, start building models, and start setting up our compute environment,” explains Grigoryan.

For all of our founders, the relationship with AWS has gone from strength to strength, as Mcgeachie explains: “We are working very closely with the AWS team on expanding the partnership, looking at critical relationships and how we can work together to drive growth.”

Simple and powerful scalability

Driving growth is of particular importance to most startup founders. But doing so requires a technical infrastructure that’s built to support it. For Agency, the simplicity and availability of AWS resources is key: “We don’t need to think ahead of time for if we need to scale tomorrow, we can get as many resources as we need that day and use very elastic compute resources whenever we need them,” says Torres. In Systalyze’s case, scaling effectively was as simple as the AWS services they were using: “S3 scales worldwide, and even for EKS, there’s a lot of regions that we can spin up new Kubernetes clusters which helps us serve our customers worldwide really well,” explains Ghobadi.

Scaling into new regions was a key objective for 7AI: “AWS enables us to extend our offering to a global audience in a way that would be impossible to do alone,” says Div. But reaching new customers is about more than just technical solutions, it’s about providing market access. Being listed on AWS Marketplace means that customers can quickly and easily purchase 7AI’s solution without its direct involvement. “This is a massive impact on a startup like us,” says Div. “The AWS Security Hub Extended gave us 1,000 new sellers at the get-go. This is something that we would never be able to do as a startup,” he continues.

The local startup community is also helping our founders power growth and innovation. Mcgeachie says: “We are working very closely with our investors here in Boston to amplify and really drive growth for the ecosystem.”

Mission-driven startups

“The startup culture in Boston is second to none. The amount of builders and the level of collaboration that we have in the city. This is something that we love and benefit from a lot,” says Div. As well as hosting the startup community for weekly meetups, 7AI is also a founding member of the Mass AI Coalition, an initiative that brings together the city’s businesses to help Boston be the leader in technology and AI.

According to our founders, the combination of academic institutions and a rich history of entrepreneurship makes Boston’s startup community stand out, leading to an “impact-oriented” mindset, as Grigoryan puts it. For Blitzy, this mindset is key to driving long-term sustainable growth: “Thinking about the goal of building a generational company, we’re looking for mission-driven individuals who can help us build it together,” says Mcgeachie.

A legacy of innovation

From the founding of world-famous academic institutions and the rise of Route 128 to today’s tech startups, Boston’s innovative spirit continues to shine through. It’s present in home-grown technical and go-to-market talent, the city’s vibrant startup community, and the world-changing aspirations of dedicated people. As Ghobadi puts it, this combination is hard to find anywhere else: “You can really see there’s a specific kind of energy in a Boston startup.” That’s why it will continue to inspire founders and innovators looking to capture that spirit and make their mark.

Having the right technical foundations in place is critical for a startup’s success. But for all the founders we’ve spoken to, AWS has been more than just an infrastructure provider. As a collaborative partner, it’s helped them build faster, scale into untapped markets, and reach new customers. “We really see working with AWS as a win, win, win across Blitzy, AWS, and our customers,” says Mcgeachie.

Whether you’re building your MVP or preparing for an IPO, AWS is here to support founders at every stage of growth. Since 2013, it has provided over US $8 billion in AWS Activate Credits https://aws.amazon.com/startups/credits/to over 350,000 startups, helping them build and scale quickly while offsetting the costs of AWS services. Interested in learning more? Apply for AWS Activate Credits today.