Amazon is offering a free year of its Kiro Pro+ AI coding tool to qualified early-stage startups. This initiative aims to encourage adoption of Kiro amidst competition in the AI-assisted development space. Kiro is an AI-driven integrated development environment (IDE) that uses autonomous agents to generate project plans, specs, and code documentation. It facilitates spec-driven development, enabling teams to define requirements, generate tested code, and deploy features more efficiently.
Kiro helps developers by bringing mature engineering practices to AI coding. It competes with tools like Microsoft GitHub's agent mode and Google's Gemini Code Assist. The Kiro Startup Credits Program offers three tiers: Starter (up to 2 users), Growth (up to 50 users), and Scale (up to 100 users). By using Kiro, startups can iterate quickly, maintain alignment across teams, and scale cleanly as complexity grows.
Kiro maintains persistent context across sessions and learns team coding standards. It also includes an AWS Security Agent to identify vulnerabilities and a DevOps Agent for performance testing. The offer is available until December 31, 2025, for early-stage to Series B, VC-backed startups in most countries.
