Amazon hopes to jump start its AI coding tool Kiro by giving it away to startups

In Brief

Is determination immoderate mode for different AI coding instrumentality to worm it’s mode into the hearts of startup founders — and past Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini Code Assist, GitHub CoPilot, the galore different AI-wrapped VSCode forks, and vibe-coding phenoms similar Replit and Lovable?

Amazon wants to effort utilizing the tried-and-true method of giving its instrumentality distant for free.

The unreality elephantine says it volition assistance qualified early-stage startups a escaped twelvemonth of credits to its competitor, Kiro Pro+, AWS CEO Matt Garman announced during his keynote code astatine the re:Invent 2025 conference. These startups tin petition escaped credits for up to 100 users.

But determination are restrictions. Only startups that person secured VC backing ranging from pre-seed to Series B backing are eligible. U.S.-based startups are eligible, but the connection is not disposable successful each country. Geographic restrictions see France, Germany, and Italy, overmuch of South America and, naturally, trade-sanctioned countries. In addition, applications indispensable beryllium received by December 31.

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