The AWS Education Accelerator Inaugural Class: The cool kids sit in the back of the bus! (CTO Houtan Fanisalek and CEO Steve Gilman pictured top right, back row.)
This month, OneRange was selected for inclusion in Amazon’s first ever AWS Education Accelerator. Through a highly competitive process in which thousands of startups applied, OneRange was chosen along with 14 other early stage companies. You can read the official press release here.
What is it?
The Accelerator is a 10-week intensive program designed to support participating EdTech businesses in accelerating their go-to-market activities. At the heart of the initiative is a focus on combining leading AI/ML technology with quality data to increase efficiencies and improve learning outcomes.
What does it mean for OneRange?
This is a huge win for OneRange for a number of reasons. For starters, we get amazing free stuff to fuel our technology development, including AWS computing credits. We’ll also receive valuable mentorship from AWS leaders, including technical expertise, business strategy consulting, and sales and marketing support. The program goes a long way toward supporting our ultimate goal, which is to be the best in the industry at leveraging data to better connect employees to the right learning resources and improve educational outcomes.
Of course, the publicity gained from association with Amazon is also very meaningful to our early stage startup. It builds on the recent recognition we’ve received from the investment community, including being named as one of the top 150 fastest growing veteran-led companies by Context Ventures.
What have we done so far?
During the week of January 8-12, we traveled to Seattle for the program kick-off. It was a packed week of activities, including innovation workshops, strategy sessions with EdTech leaders, advice on best practices for using data, and even courses on emotional intelligence. We generated lots of ideas for new ways to use AI to improve our product.
We had a great time meeting our AWS advisors and connecting with other leading EdTech startups with similar missions. It’s always energizing to collaborate with like-minded colleagues and go into full geek mode discussing technology challenges and solutions. We did a lot of hard work, but we also had plenty of fun during happy hours and tours of the amazing Amazon Seattle campus. Did you know they have three giant glass domes with more than 40,000 plants where employees can hang out and work?!
What’s in it for OneRange clients?
We have a very clear-eyed vision for how we’ll utilize the AWS Education Accelerator to advance our product roadmap. AI will enable us to analyze the metadata we receive from providers to automatically tag resources with skills categories that matter to you. Ultimately, this will help us improve our content recommendation engine to serve you only the most relevant resources. And we’re also using AI to create personalized career pathways, or progressive series of courses that will enable your employees to achieve their long-term career goals.
But this is just the beginning. Who knows what other ideas we might come up with for creative uses of AI? The AWS Accelerator will no doubt be game changing for both OneRange and our clients.
Check out our photos of the kickoff week in Seattle below!
