Dedalus Labs: Building the Compute Layer for Every AI Agent | AWS Startups | Amazon Web Services

In this episode of Napkin to MVP, the founder of Dedalus Labs shares how a conviction that nobody else was building the right future for AI agents turned into a research lab, a pivot, and eventually the compute substrate for an agent-native world. It's the unpolished story of going from an idea on a napkin to virtual machines that boot in 50 milliseconds, built for agentic workloads that need to be persistent, fast, and always on. The team started by building agent infrastructure, but quickly learned the primitive underneath wasn't good enough. Users hated their existing sandboxes. So Dedalus built their own VM from scratch, shipping a first MVP in two weeks with a 2-3 second cold start, then obsessively optimizing it down to 150 milliseconds, then 50. Along the way, the team faced the classic founder question: when is it good enough to ship? For Dedalus, the answer was always "not yet." Starting with credits through AWS Activate, Dedalus has been working closely with the AWS team from day one. Today, Dedalus Machines sits on top of EC2 and S3, and every new Dedalus customer becomes an AWS customer by default. This is what building with AI on AWS looks like for startups: infrastructure so fast and reliable that nobody even notices it's there, powering the agents that will define the next era of computing. AWS gives founders the AI, compute, and infrastructure to go from idea to impact faster. ▶ Read the full founder story: https://aws.amazon.com/aws-startups/learn/founders-stories/dedalus/ ▶ Explore AI for Startups: https://go.aws/4svMtSR Napkin to MVP is a founder-led series from AWS Startups showcasing how early-stage teams build from a first idea to a real product with AI on AWS. Subscribe for more founder stories. Subscribe to AWS: https://go.aws/subscribe Create a free AWS account: https://go.aws/signup Try AWS for free: https://go.aws/free Connect with an expert: https://go.aws/contact Explore more: https://go.aws/more Next steps: Explore on AWS in Analyst Research: https://go.aws/reports Discover, deploy, and manage software that runs on AWS: https://go.aws/marketplace Join the AWS Partner Network: https://go.aws/partners Learn more on how Amazon builds and operates software: https://go.aws/library Do you have technical AWS questions? Ask the community of experts on AWS re:Post: https://go.aws/3lPaoPb Why AWS? Amazon Web Services is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, enabling customers to build anything they can imagine. We offer the greatest choice of innovative cloud capabilities and expertise, on the most extensive global infrastructure with industry-leading security, reliability, and performance. #AWSStartups #AIforStartups #AWSActivate #AWS #AmazonWebServices #CloudComputing