‘Amazon Web Services’, First Participation in Nurturing Domestic Startups

[Asia Economy Reporter Moon Hyewon] The startup nurturing program collaborating with global conglomerates will now include 'Amazon Web Services' alongside the existing partners 'Google' and 'NVIDIA'.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced on the 7th that it will establish the 'Jungle Program' in collaboration with Amazon Web Services to support the global leap of domestic startups, and will recruit startups to participate from the 8th to the 31st of this month.

Here, 'Jungle' symbolically means a truly global program.

Currently, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups is conducting collaboration programs with global companies to promote startups' global expansion. Last year, it launched the 'Changgu Program' in collaboration with Google for the first time, providing startups with technology and market consulting as well as market development support. Due to high response and satisfaction from startups, the number of participating companies in Changgu was increased from 60 to 80 this year.

The Jungle Program supports startups in fields such as E-commerce, Fintech, Smart Logistics, and AI, with a business operation period of more than 3 years and less than 7 years, and the support scale is 30 companies.

For selected startups, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups will provide up to 300 million KRW in commercialization funds for one year, and for startups with excellent commercialization performance, follow-up R&D funds of up to 400 million KRW for two years will be supported.

Amazon Web Services plans to provide one-on-one consulting matching with headquarters experts by field, support for using Amazon Web Services cloud, and overseas market development linked with Amazon.com and others.

Entrepreneurs wishing to participate in the Jungle Program can apply online through the K-Startup website. A business briefing session will be held online via the Twitch channel on the 15th.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups plans to gradually expand collaboration fields beyond IT to include bio and manufacturing, reflecting the increasing demand from startups for global collaboration programs.

A Ministry of SMEs and Startups official said, “The collaboration program with Amazon Web Services is expected to create new opportunities to apply Amazon’s know-how in non-face-to-face distribution, payment, and content business to startups in the era of non-face-to-face due to COVID-19.”