Atal Innovation Mission opens AWS EdStart accelerator to edtech founders in its incubators

On March 19, 2021, the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), the innovation agency housed in the Indian government think tank NITI Aayog, announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services aimed at education technology startups and cloud skills in schools. NITI Aayog signed a Statement of Intent with Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), the company that resells and markets AWS cloud services in India. Under the arrangement, AIM adopted AWS EdStart, a virtual accelerator for edtech companies, for founders in its incubation network.

Edtech founders at more than 80 Atal Incubation Centres and Atal Community Innovation Centres became eligible to apply for EdStart benefits, according to the announcement. Those benefits were listed as AWS promotional credits, mentorship and technical training, intended to help startups build teaching and learning products on the AWS cloud. The published reports did not give the value of the credits or the number of startups expected to take part, and no cohort names were announced at the time.

The agreement also reached into schools. Students at more than 7,000 Atal Tinkering Labs were to learn cloud fundamentals through AWS Educate, covering storage, virtual computing, web hosting, artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual reality. AWS planned faculty development programs for lab staff and said it would provide tools for students to build cloud solutions. The two partners also said they would run joint workshops, tech marathons and national challenges focused on cloud-based answers to local community problems and the Sustainable Development Goals.

EdStart was not new to India. AWS made the program available to Indian edtech companies through AISPL in June 2018, two months after launching it in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and at that time it was open to startups less than five years old with annual revenue under $10 million. In the 2021 announcement, an AWS executive cited an AlphaBeta report commissioned by AWS, which projected that India would need nine times as many digitally skilled workers by 2025. Under the 2021 arrangement, the Atal Incubation Centres taking part were those based at higher education institutions, alongside the community innovation centres.