Amazon Web Services Launches London Startup Centre

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of e-commerce giant Amazon, is opening a centre in London designed to give a physical space to nurture, train and support growing startups.

Dubbed a ‘loft’, the space will be the first of its kind outside of the United States, where similar offices exist in New York and San Francisco.

Visitors to the loft will be able to participate in training courses, boot camps, meetups, or just “grab a coffee and work on their app”.

Hotbed

“The UK is a hotbed of innovation and London is one of the main places where we see talented, ambitious entrepreneurs coming together to test ideas and start new businesses that leverage cloud computing,” said Werner Vogels, CTO and Vice President, Amazon.com.

“With the Amazon Web Services Pop-up Loft in London we will be bringing together a host of AWS resources, and some of the brightest and most creative minds in the industry, to help startups across the UK. We look forward to working alongside the next generation of UK businesses and helping them to reach their full potential.”

The Loft will be open from September 10 until October 29. Presumably, in return, AWS will be grooming a new generation of potential customers for its cloud services platform. Who knows, today’s startup might be tomorrow’s Google.

Amazon Web Services already counts some of the UK’s most successful startups as customers, including Mendeley, Playmob, Yoyo Wallet, and GoSquared.

London cab app Hailo, which is built entirely on AWS, praised the loft. “We built our business on AWS and everything we do is in the cloud,” said Feidhlim O’Neill ,who is the vice president of platform and technical operations at Hailo.

“We look forward to presenting at the AWS Pop-up Loft when it opens, sharing some of our experiences of growing an international business on AWS and some of the advice we would give to other startups on the same journey we were on only a few years ago.”

More details of the Loft can be found here.

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