Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health concern. Microorganisms mutate, making them immune to traditional antimicrobials as they transform into ‘superbugs’. Healthtech startup AarogyaAI’s aim is to aid antimicrobials stay one step ahead of the bugs. Its vision is to make precision diagnosis for antimicrobial resistance accessible at the point of care by harnessing the powers of genomics and artificial intelligence (AI).
“The aim is to AI helps unearth future drug resistance patterns to pre-emptively plan actions and combat the next pandemic,” says CEO Praapti Jayaswal, who co-founded AarogyaAI in 2019 with Avlokita Tiwari.
AarogyaAI uses AI and machine learning (ML) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to diagnose drug resistance in patients caused by bacterial, fungal, and viral pathogens. The company today has nine clinical and commercial partnerships, and is running six infectious disease pipelines on the AWS cloud, as well as its repository of nearly 20,000 pathogen genomes.
In order to build a secure, reliable, and scalable healthcare application, it went all-in on AWS. Aarogya AI uses AWS managed services like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Elastic Load Balancing to complete tasks which would otherwise be cumbersome for engineering teams. This allows AarogyaAI to focus more on feature development of their product, instead of focusing on operating on a technology data centre and the overhead that comes along with that.
To accelerate growth, AarogyaAI applied for and was accepted into AWS ML Elevate, an accelerator programme that helps AI and ML startups to showcase their innovations while providing mentorship and access to VC channels. As the healthtech startup experimented, the amount of computation it used raised its AWS bill. However, as members of AWS Activate — a programme that helps startups to build and scale — it was able to apply for $100,000 in AWS credits towards its bill.
“AWS in both India and the US were so generous in letting us know about different aspects of cost optimisation. We were able to cut down our bill by 38% almost immediately,” said Avlokita Tiwari, co-founder and chief technology officer, AarogyaAI.
The support ecosystem
AWS provides tailored programmes that support startups at different stages of their journey. “Startups need the most help at a very early stage, when they have an idea and want to build it out,” explained Kumara Raghavan, head, Startups, at AWS India.
At that stage, AWS provides startups access to the AWS Activate programme. Along with various resources, it also offers AWS credits, which helps to alleviate the financial weight of experimentation, lowering the cost of curiosity, and allowing startups to fail fast without incurring heavy costs. Over the past year alone, Amazon has provided nearly $1 billion in credits through the AWS Activate programme to help startups grow and scale their businesses.
Nimble at any scale
As startups progress and reach the mid-stage, AWS offers support in the form of specialised accelerator programmes, “We identify and select early-stage startups and accelerate their journey to scale by providing them mentorship, networking support, and access to various resources through programmes such as ML Elevate, SaaS Central, and AccelerateHer,” Raghavan informed.
At the mature stage, startups require differentiation and the ability to handle exponential growth, and AWS supports them to achieve both. “INDmoney, a fintech startup with over 8 million users, needed a solid architecture to support their growth plans, innovate, and control costs at the same time. INDmoney launched on the AWS Cloud, and adopted multiple AWS managed services to run their business. By using Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) on spot instances, INDmoney managed to reduce its computing costs by 50-70%. By using integration of AWS Lambda and Amazon Redshift, INDmoney is able to generate 4 million personalised banners, within 15 minutes, to provide customised recommendations and insights to each user,” said Raghavan.
Cost is a key focus
One of the critical focus areas for startups is to optimise costs, and AWS enables that in different ways, “We use different levers to help startups to optimise their cloud costs, without having to compromise on innovation and growth,” he added.
RTI International, a global leader in research, studied the role of AWS’ cloud services in India’s digital economy. About 70% of startups said their use of AWS services helped them achieve their annual turnover goal.
BIG BENEFITS
* AWS helps startups with tools and resources to grow their business
* Provided $1 billion in credits via AWS Activate
*AarogyaAI uses AI/ML on AWS to diagnose antimicrobial resistance
* Has six infectious disease pipelines on AWS cloud
* INDmoney reduces computing costs by 70% using Amazon ECS
