Amazon Web Services (AWS) said 2021 is a great year for Filipino startups which are born in the cloud, according to Digbijoy Shukla, Business Development lead for Asean at AWS.
At an online briefing, Shukla said despite the pandemic, AWS has been seeing a fair amount of total venture funding and investments coming into the ecosystem in Southeast Asia.
“In terms of the number of deals, we’ve actually seen an increase of startups getting funded, especially in the early stages. Fintech companies received the most funding,” he said.
Shukla noted the cloud is the best place to build startups as it offers the best possible environment for them to flourish.
In the case of AWS, its zero upfront cost and pay-as-you -go pricing model helps a startup have an estimate how much resources to set aside while being able to go online in a couple of minutes with just a few clicks
“All the costs of experimentation have really come down. If the experiment works, they can scale up the resources … If it’s not working, they can just shut down,” Shukla said.
The cloud, he added, enables startups to focus on building better products and “leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing IT infrastructure services to AWS.”
At the forum, two Philippines startups Zagana and PayMongo shared their experiences.
“There are more and more startups opening up, especially that (shift to) digital was accelerated by the pandemic. There’s a lot of startups getting funded as well because most of them are scalable. The technology using the AWS (compared with) traditional e-commerce — which takes around three to seven days for the items to arrive at your doorstep — with instant commerce, it only takes you around 30 minutes. That’s what we’re doing right now, we’re trying to revolutionize the way you shop for fresh produce,” said Joshua Aragon, founder of Zagana, an online source for fresh produce and frozen goods.
PayMongo,a fast growing online payments processing company in the Philippines, cited how AWS helped it achieve the highest level of security and compliance when it comes to receiving payments.
“AWS was very helpful because it has a lot of resources available online which we can use as a reference on how to design a scalable architecture to support our compliance. AWS has a lot of certifications that we need so it lessens the work on our end (and) that helps us speed up or lessen the work that we have to do in order for us to be compliant,” said Jaime Ing III, founder of PayMongo.
