I agree that you qualify as a startup, and I do think you have a chance to be a bigger business than either Weogeo or Brainscape. Milemeter and UserTesting were the two companies I was referring to as the only ones to come close to Amazon’s own criteria.

Can your business be bigger than UserTesting? I have no idea. But you do have to deal with regulatory hurdles before you can reach your customers, which is a risk factor UserTesting does not have to deal with.

While I’m sure that there’s a good market for Milemeter, it would also seem that the $11B number you mention is for all auto insurance in Texas, not just the low-mileage drivers your service targets.

Regardless, as I think the post makes clear, my real issue is the fact that 3 out of 7 finalists have already raised significant funding, and of the four remaining contestants, at most two meet Amazon’s stated criteria.

Good luck with the competition. Hopefully the winner will be one of the groups that actually needs the money…

MileMeter has regulatory approval for the whole state of Texas, which is an $11 billion market. We can also expand to other states fairly quickly, since we did all the hard prep work as part of the Texas approval process.

We can compete very effectively against the established insurance industry, but the details are inappropriate for a blog post.

While we don’t have the computational demands of a media-streaming services, we do use EC2 currently for our app servers, databases and load balancers.

From a programming standpoint, you might find it interesting that we wrote all of our applications in Ruby.

Thanks for checking us out.

Sincerely,
Chris