Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is collaborating with technology accelerator Sw7 to support African businesses in their efforts to scale up their offerings.

This is as Sw7 looks to up the ante of its content and support for thousands of African enterprises.

According to a statement, the collaboration follows a 2019 pilot where the two organisations came together to help a group of African business-to-business (B2B) and software as a service businesses scale up.

The terms of the partnership will see AWS and Sw7 support founders and C-level leaders of product-led B2B technology businesses and independent software vendors.

They will help them find the resources they need to build their businesses, go to market, acquire more customers, create predictable revenue, expand offshore and raise funding and scale at an accelerated rate, reveals the statement.

Keith Jones, founder of Sw7, says there is always more to do to turn individual African dreams into economic global realities.

“In the last few years, Sw7 has supported hundreds of enterprises that are now competing. Our goal is to accelerate 7 000 businesses across the continent. When you need to do something at a scale like this, it helps to have one of the world’s leading hyper-scalers at your side.”

Sw7 defines itself as an African mentor-led tech innovation accelerator, bringing together founders and C-level leaders of B2B product-led technology businesses that crowdsource recommendations to the best products, service providers, content and information organised around business problems.

Jones says Sw7 enterprises are given access to insights that include the latest AWS services, best practices and technical expertise. This is in addition to over 100 tech founder CEOs and various other industry and subject matter experts.

“This is exactly what we mean when we say we tap into the collective intelligence, knowledge and support of an experienced business network and you can basically access this anytime from anywhere – that’s the power of virtual acceleration.”

Furthermore, Sw7 enhances the power of the collective in the form of crowdsourced problem-solving, states Jones.

“When you’re sitting at a conference and a speaker poses a problem to the audience, you best believe that the answer is sitting in that room somewhere. This is why we have set up a platform within our programme to bring great minds together as they can crowdsource solutions from industry peers.”