Before investors come into play, most startups drown in AWS bills. Amazon's program turns infrastructure costs into zero-equity funding that keeps founders building instead of fundraising, with approval timelines shorter than most investor coffee meetings.Learn more: http://xraise.ai
Forget pitch decks for a moment. Seven billion dollars. That's how much Amazon has quietly given away to startups since twenty thirteen, and you probably didn't even know you could apply. Not loans. Not equity deals. Just straight-up infrastructure credits that let you build your product without touching your bank account or giving up ownership. Here's the thing nobody tells you about starting a company: cloud bills start adding up before you've made a single dollar. You're paying for servers, databases, storage, all this infrastructure just to test if your idea even works. And while you're busy perfecting pitch decks and chasing investor meetings, there's this massive pool of free money sitting there that covers all of it. The application takes maybe an hour, but somehow everyone's too busy networking at startup events to notice. AWS Activate runs two tracks, and understanding which one fits your situation changes everything. If you're bootstrapping solo or with a small team, Activate Founders hands you one thousand dollars in credits plus another three fifty for developer support and technical training. The requirements are dead simple: a company less than ten years old, fewer than ten employees, under a million in revenue or total funding, and an active AWS account with a working website. That's literally it. No pitch deck required. No cap table gymnastics. Just documentation proving you're a real business building something. But here's where it gets interesting. If you're connected to any accelerator or venture firm, the Portfolio track jumps to five thousand minimum and goes all the way up to one hundred thousand dollars. Building AI models that need serious compute power? That number hits three hundred thousand specifically for foundation model workloads. Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, On Deck, Plug and Play, all these programs have direct partnerships that unlock these amounts for their portfolio companies. You just need an Organization ID from your partner, which they'll give you if you ask. These credits cover everything you'd actually use to build a product. EC2 servers for hosting your application, S3 buckets for storage, RDS for managing databases, Lambda for serverless functions, even Amazon Bedrock for accessing AI models from companies like Anthropic and Meta. Over two hundred services automatically pull from your credit balance before they ever charge your card. The only rule is you can't backdate them, credits only work for current billing cycles, so you can't use December money to pay September bills. Now here's the part that really changes the game for strategic founders. You can stack these from multiple sources as long as they come from different channels. Y Combinator Startup School gives you twenty-five hundred just for applying, no batch acceptance required. Stripe Atlas bundles five thousand when you incorporate through them, which makes sense if you're setting up a new legal entity anyway. FounderPass adds another five thousand behind a membership fee that also discounts tools like Notion and HubSpot. Do the math and you're looking at twelve thousand five hundred in combined credits from different programs, all completely legitimate to stack together. The application process itself is faster than scheduling a coffee chat with a potential investor. You pick your track based on funding stage and partner relationships, grab your website URL, LinkedIn page, and AWS account information, then submit everything through the official portal. Seven to ten business days later, credits show up in your billing console automatically. No follow-up calls. No negotiations. Just money in your account ready to use. But getting approved for credits is only half the equation. Using them strategically is what separates startups that burn through everything in two months from ones that stretch six months of runway or longer. Serverless architectures using Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3 scale to zero when nobody's using your application, meaning you only pay for actual compute time instead of keeping expensive servers running around the clock. Spot Instances give you identical computing power as regular EC2 instances at seventy to ninety percent discounts, perfect for machine learning training, batch processing, anything that can tolerate occasional interruptions. Set up AWS Budgets with spending alerts so you catch overages before they drain your balance unexpectedly. The biggest waste happens with development and staging environments running twenty-four seven when your team only works business hours. Schedule automatic shutdowns after hours and on weekends. That one change alone can double how long your credits last without changing anything about how you build. Technology credits for startups represent real capital that extends your runway without diluting ownership stakes. You're not choosing between building or fundraising anymore. You can validate your entire concept on free infrastructure before you ever need to pitch investors or open a cap table. Click the link in the description for the complete breakdown of eligibility requirements and step-by-step application instructions for both AWS Activate tracks.
XRaise
City: San Francisco
Address: 39 Tehama Street
Website: http://xraise.ai