AWS News Blog
AWS Hot Startups – March 2017
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As the madness of March rounds up, take a break from all the basketball and check out the cool startups Tina Barr brings you for this month!
-Ana
The arrival of spring brings five new startups this month:
- Amino Apps – providing social networks for hundreds of thousands of communities.
- Appboy – empowering brands to strengthen customer relationships.
- Arterys – revolutionizing the medical imaging industry.
- Protenus – protecting patient data for healthcare organizations.
- Syapse – improving targeted cancer care with shared data from across the country.
In case you missed them, check out February’s hot startups here.
Amino Apps (New York, NY)
Amino Apps was founded on the belief that interest-based communities were underdeveloped and outdated, particularly when it came to mobile. CEO Ben Anderson and CTO Yin Wang created the app to give users access to hundreds of thousands of communities, each of them a complete social network dedicated to a single topic. Some of the largest communities have over 1 million members and are built around topics like popular TV shows, video games, sports, and an endless number of hobbies and other interests. Amino hosts communities from around the world and is currently available in six languages with many more on the way.
Navigating the Amino app is easy. Simply download the app (iOS or Android), sign up with a valid email address, choose a profile picture, and start exploring. Users can search for communities and join any that fit their interests. Each community has chatrooms, multimedia content, quizzes, and a seamless commenting system. If a community doesn’t exist yet, users can create it in minutes using the Amino Creator and Manager app (ACM). The largest user-generated communities are turned into their own apps, which gives communities their own piece of real estate on members’ phones, as well as in app stores.
Amino’s vast global network of hundreds of thousands of communities is run on AWS services. Every day users generate, share, and engage with an enormous amount of content across hundreds of mobile applications. By leveraging AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, and Amazon CloudFront, Amino can continue to provide new features to their users while scaling their service capacity to keep up with user growth.
Interested in joining Amino? Check out their jobs page here.
Appboy (New York, NY)
In 2011, Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian saw a unique opportunity to strengthen and humanize relationships between brands and their customers through technology. The trio created Appboy to empower brands to build long-term relationships with their customers and today they are the leading lifecycle engagement platform for marketing, growth, and engagement teams. The team recognized that as rapid mobile growth became undeniable, many brands were becoming frustrated with the lack of compelling and seamless cross-channel experiences offered by existing marketing clouds. Many of today’s top mobile apps and enterprise companies trust Appboy to take their marketing to the next level. Appboy manages user profiles for nearly 700 million monthly active users, and is used to power more than 10 billion personalized messages monthly across a multitude of channels and devices.
Appboy creates a holistic user profile that offers a single view of each customer. That user profile in turn powers contextual cross-channel messaging, lifecycle engagement automation, and robust campaign insights and optimization opportunities. Appboy offers solutions that allow brands to create push notifications, targeted emails, in-app and in-browser messages, news feed cards, and webhooks to enhance the user experience and increase customer engagement. The company prides itself on its interoperability, connecting to a variety of complimentary marketing tools and technologies so brands can build the perfect stack to enable their strategies and experiments in real time.
AWS makes it easy for Appboy to dynamically size all of their service components and automatically scale up and down as needed. They use an array of services including Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling groups, and Amazon S3 to help scale capacity and better deal with unpredictable customer loads.
To keep up with the latest marketing trends and tactics, visit the Appboy digital magazine, Relate. Appboy was also recently featured in the #StartupsOnAir video series where they gave insight into their AWS usage.
Arterys (San Francisco, CA)
Getting test results back from a physician can often be a time consuming and tedious process. Clinicians typically employ a variety of techniques to manually measure medical images and then make their assessments. Arterys founders Fabien Beckers, John Axerio-Cilies, Albert Hsiao, and Shreyas Vasanawala realized that much more computation and advanced analytics were needed to harness all of the valuable information in medical images, especially those generated by MRI and CT scanners. Clinicians were often skipping measurements and making assessments based mostly on qualitative data. Their solution was to start a cloud/AI software company focused on accelerating data-driven medicine with advanced software products for post-processing of medical images.
Arterys’ products provide timely, accurate, and consistent quantification of images, improve speed to results, and improve the quality of the information offered to the treating physician. This allows for much better tracking of a patient’s condition, and thus better decisions about their care. Advanced analytics, such as deep learning and distributed cloud computing, are used to process images. The first Arterys product can contour cardiac anatomy as accurately as experts, but takes only 15-20 seconds instead of the 45-60 minutes required to do it manually. Their computing cloud platform is also fully HIPAA compliant.
Arterys relies on a variety of AWS services to process their medical images. Using deep learning and other advanced analytic tools, Arterys is able to render images without latency over a web browser using AWS G2 instances. They use Amazon EC2 extensively for all of their compute needs, including inference and rendering, and Amazon S3 is used to archive images that aren’t needed immediately, as well as manage costs. Arterys also employs Amazon Route 53, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon EC2 Container Service.
Check out this quick video about the technology that Arterys is creating. They were also recently featured in the #StartupsOnAir video series and offered a quick demo of their product.
Protenus (Baltimore, MD)
Protenus founders Nick Culbertson and Robert Lord were medical students at Johns Hopkins Medical School when they saw first-hand how Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems could be used to improve patient care and share clinical data more efficiently. With increased efficiency came a huge issue – an onslaught of serious security and privacy concerns. Over the past two years, 140 million medical records have been breached, meaning that approximately 1 in 3 Americans have had their health data compromised. Health records contain a repository of sensitive information and a breach of that data can cause major havoc in a patient’s life – namely identity theft, prescription fraud, Medicare/Medicaid fraud, and improper performance of medical procedures. Using their experience and knowledge from former careers in the intelligence community and involvement in a leading hedge fund, Nick and Robert developed the prototype and algorithms that launched Protenus.
Today, Protenus offers a number of solutions that detect breaches and misuse of patient data for healthcare organizations nationwide. Using advanced analytics and AI, Protenus’ health data insights platform understands appropriate vs. inappropriate use of patient data in the EHR. It also protects privacy, aids compliance with HIPAA regulations, and ensures trust for patients and providers alike.
Protenus built and operates its SaaS offering atop Amazon EC2, where Dedicated Hosts and encrypted Amazon EBS volume are used to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulation for the storage of Protected Health Information. They use Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 for DNS, enabling unique, secure client specific access points to their Protenus instance.
To learn more about threats to patient data, read Hospitals’ Biggest Threat to Patient Data is Hiding in Plain Sight on the Protenus blog. Also be sure to check out their recent video in the #StartupsOnAir series for more insight into their product.
Syapse (Palo Alto, CA)
Syapse provides a comprehensive software solution that enables clinicians to treat patients with precision medicine for targeted cancer therapies — treatments that are designed and chosen using genetic or molecular profiling. Existing hospital IT doesn’t support the robust infrastructure and clinical workflows required to treat patients with precision medicine at scale, but Syapse centralizes and organizes patient data to clinicians at the point of care. Syapse offers a variety of solutions for oncologists that allow them to access the full scope of patient data longitudinally, view recommended treatments or clinical trials for similar patients, and track outcomes over time. These solutions are helping health systems across the country to improve patient outcomes by offering the most innovative care to cancer patients.
Leading health systems such as Stanford Health Care, Providence St. Joseph Health, and Intermountain Healthcare are using Syapse to improve patient outcomes, streamline clinical workflows, and scale their precision medicine programs. A group of experts known as the Molecular Tumor Board (MTB) reviews complex cases and evaluates patient data, documents notes, and disseminates treatment recommendations to the treating physician. Syapse also provides reports that give health system staff insight into their institution’s oncology care, which can be used toward quality improvement, business goals, and understanding variables in the oncology service line.
Syapse uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, and Amazon Elastic Block Store to build a high-performance, scalable, and HIPAA-compliant data platform that enables health systems to make precision medicine part of routine cancer care for patients throughout the country.
Be sure to check out the Syapse blog to learn more and also their recent video on the #StartupsOnAir video series where they discuss their product, HIPAA compliance, and more about how they are using AWS.
Thank you for checking out another month of awesome hot startups!
-Tina Barr