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Daemon has officially been named 2025 AWS Innovation Partner of the Year (EMEA) at AWS re:Invent in Vegas. For us, this isn’t about a trophy on the shelf. It’s about the movement we’re building, the challenges we’re solving for our clients, and the vision we’re enacting alongside our partners at AWS.
We sat down with Max Costick, Daemon AWS Alliance Manager, and Damien Duff, Daemon AI Principal Consultant, to get under the hood of this win.
Q: Max, our relationship with AWS is clearly more than just a badge. Why is that partnership so strong, and what’s the actual payoff for our clients?
Max: It’s about having the keys to the engine room. As a top-tier partner, we don’t just wait for updates. We get early access to the latest tech and direct lines to the product teams building it. We see what’s coming down the track before anyone else.
For our clients, that is a massive advantage. It means we aren’t just building for today. We are future-proofing them with the very latest tools. We take that insider access and turn it into momentum, keeping them ahead of the curve while others are still reading the manual. Clients get the confidence that they are working with the A-Team.
Q: This is a massive milestone for Daemon. What makes you proudest of this award?
Max: Being named AWS Innovation Partner of the Year (EMEA) is an important moment for Daemon. It validates the platform we’re building with AWS and the power of our “One Team” mentality. We’ve never been about transactions - we’re about genuine partnership. I’m proud because this isn’t just about tech; it’s about our people being there every day to solve real problems for our clients, like Tachmed.
Damien: I really think that with AI we need to put human potential first, and this award confirms that feeling is resonating. We have consciously gone looking for complex problems to be able to grow our capabilities and impact. It makes me personally glow that this has resulted in us finding ourselves in a place to contribute, really giving things back to the world, which by the way, to me is the key part of Demon's mission that really captured my imagination when I heard it. This kind of work is absolutely why I'm in this business.
Q: Innovation as a word is often misused, but this award proves we actually do it. What expertise led us here?
Damien: We have a considerable depth of experience - excellence - across software and cloud, which works well with our AI capabilities, making it easy as a business to swarm around full-stack, end-to-end solutions. We take a specific pride in bridging the gap between "abstract idea" and "concrete reality."; using AI to reach very relevant outcomes - in Tachmed's case, this meant helping their scientists use our AI-powered solution to get the critical information they need to make their lives easy.
Max: Exactly. And we have the heavyweight experience to back it up. We know the AWS landscape inside out, which gives us the confidence to avoid the jargon and just get to the point. We looked at the big picture beyond the client’s "in-house" limitations. Whether it was modernising legacy systems or building fresh AI architectures, we kept it simple, punchy, and focused on value. We didn't just explain what needed to be done; we won hearts and minds by showing them the art of the possible.
Q: The award entry was based on our work with Tachmed. Damien, can you walk us through exactly what we did and why it was so innovative?
Damien: Absolutely. Tachmed had a challenge that, when fixed, would impact their work which in turn promises to impact people's lives positively on a massive scale. Tachmed are building a library of assays (tests) as a part of their cloud-connected at-home testing kit - a mission to democratise healthcare, but their scientists would spend weeks manually trawling through scientific literature and vendor data to identify and work with the right clinical use cases and reagents to build tests with. This could take a long time and any errors would lead to expensive rework later on when they needed to use their findings in lab testing and development. It was a bottleneck that was slowing down life-saving innovation.
Normally, academic papers and vendor websites and other sources of information are very unstructured - either you need a human reading it or you need humans to take the information and make it usable by computers - to find patterns across them, connect one thing up with another, e.g. a clinical use case and clinical need, a particular prototype test, the compounds used to make up the test, where you can buy those compounds. Now with AI we can do this linking - we can distil and extract information by linking these entities up across vast amounts of data, collecting insights, proposing and prioritising promising use cases or prototype tests, and connecting those up with potential compounds that can be used in those tests. So AI gives us the super-power ability to distil knowledge from sources, in this case, academic papers about clinical tests, their use cases, as well as vendors selling compounds for them. Something that would take a talented and educated individual weeks can be compressed to hours, accelerating the science.
At Daemon, we always work to leave our clients enabled. In this case, we worked really closely with the scientists at Tachmed to understand their needs and at the same time worked with them to help them understand how AI can enable them to deliver on their mission. We figured out together what the most high impact use case was and built a bespoke, AI solution using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
First, the tool extracts deep insights from PubMed and vendor websites, pulling the needle out of the haystack. Second, it organises that chaos. The system identifies key details, such as biomarkers and test types, and synthesises them into actionable insights. This is all built to scale and robustness on AWS managed services, ensuring it grows as they grow.
The result? We cut Tachmed's clinical research time by as much as 50%. We saved scientists a week on every two-week literature review. Ultimately, this meant that we gave them their time back to focus on the breakthroughs that actually matter. That is why we won.
Read more about the Tachmed case study here.
Q: Looking forward, what does this mean for the future of Daemon and our partnership with AWS?
Max: At Daemon, we are optimists who relish a challenge. This award gives us the platform to think even bigger. We’re going to deepen the partnership, push the boundaries of working with AWS, and keep raising the bar of what innovation looks like.
Damien: We need to take this momentum to ensure that AI really is making the world a better place. That sounds grand, but it's for me just essential - there's no real alternative. The power of AWS allows us to tackle problems that actually matter and by continuing to embrace a people-first philosophy and valuing creativity, and continuing to work with innovative clients and partners that are building a better future, anything should be possible.
Let’s build some momentum together. Get in touch with the team today.