NVIDIA, AssemblyAI and now AWS Activate: one week of startup programs for a solo founder

Quick build-in-public update from Sponkly (real-time voice translation for chat, calls and meetings in 32 languages).

This week:

• NVIDIA Inception: accepted

• AssemblyAI Startup Program: accepted

• AWS Activate: $10,000 in credits issued today

What it changed right away: we moved Video Studio's speech recognition to AssemblyAI and raised the video limit from 5 minutes to 1 hour. A 30-minute video is now transcribed in ~10 seconds and is ready with subtitles in under 2 minutes. The AWS credits give us room to scale the backend as usage grows.

Tip for other bootstrapped founders: AWS rejected my first two Founders-tier applications (the first one because my company email domain did not match my AWS account email). What finally worked was applying through a partner program (NVIDIA Inception's AWS offer), with the same email domain everywhere.

sponkly.com

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