ATLANTA – February 10, 2020 – CREATE-X at Georgia Tech announced today that Amazon will support student startups and promote innovation in voice technology across campus through the Alexa Fund Fellowship. Georgia Tech is the fifth university awarded support through the Alexa Fund with the purpose of advancing voice-based technology.

“The support from Amazon is a huge opportunity for our students who are interested in conversational AI research and technology,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, director and co-founder of CREATE-X and Wayne J. Holman chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. “With this funding, we hope to empower our students to catalyze their ideas within the voice technology space, all while keeping an entrepreneurial mindset.”

CREATE-X and the Alexa Fund will work together with early-stage startups to enable students to innovate using voice-based technology and harness the power of conversational AI. Applications are now open for the 2020 CREATE-X Startup Launch summer accelerator program.

“The goal of the Alexa Fund is to empower and support startups of all stages working with voice technology and AI,” said Paul Bernard, Director of the Alexa Fund at Amazon. “We’re inspired by the creativity and tenacity of the students that are part of CREATE-X at Georgia Tech and are honored to support them through the Alexa Fund Fellowship as they tackle some of the hardest challenges in conversational AI.”

CREATE-X at Georgia Tech is a visionary enterprise aimed at systematically nurturing entrepreneurial confidence as one of the signature attributes of Georgia Tech graduates. The broader goal of this initiative is to provide the knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences that will give Georgia Tech graduates the confidence to actively create their own future.

“Georgia Tech is one of five universities to receive this funding from Amazon in 2020,  so we are exceedingly proud of the CREATE-X program and all of its students and faculty,” said Steve McLaughlin, dean and Southern Company chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and co-founder of CREATE-X. “The College is excited to see what our students can do with these resources that will fuel voice technology innovation across the world.”

About The Alexa Fund

The Alexa Fund provides up to $200 million in venture capital funding to fuel voice technology innovation. We believe experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology. Since introducing Alexa-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo, we’ve heard from developers, device-makers, and companies of all sizes that want to innovate with voice. Whether that’s creating new Alexa capabilities with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), building devices that use Alexa for new and novel voice experiences using the Alexa Voice Service (AVS), inventing core voice-enabling technology, or developing a product or service that can expand the boundaries of voice technology, we’d love to talk to you.

About The Alexa Fellowship

The Alexa Fellowship inspires and enables the next generation of curious minds to invent the next big thing in conversational AI. The Graduate Fellowship supports PhD and post-doctoral students specializing in conversational AI at select universities. The Innovation Fellowship empowers technology entrepreneurship faculty members to help student entrepreneurs innovate with voice interfaces.

About CREATE-X at Georgia Tech

CREATE-X is a faculty-led, student-focused initiative to instill entrepreneurial confidence in Georgia Tech’s students. The broader goal of CREATE-X is to provide the knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences that will give Georgia Tech graduates the confidence to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and create their own future. Learn more at create-x.gatech.edu.

About Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering

Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering offers the resources of a major technological university and a location in the heart of cosmopolitan Atlanta. The College is the largest of the Institute’s six colleges, enrolling more than 60 percent of the students at Georgia Tech and about half of all tenured and tenure-track faculty at the Institute. U.S. News and World Report ranks the College in the top four of engineering programs in the country. The College offers more than 50 different degree programs at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels through its main Atlanta campus and satellite campuses around the world. As a leader in engineering education, the College graduates the largest number of women and minority engineers in the country. Visit www.coe.gatech.edu to learn more.