Microsoft Ventures launches initiative to help corporates engage with start-ups

To start with, Innovation for Corporates Initiative will offer three programmes including Market Access Programme, Partner in Acceleration and High Performance programmes

Microsoft Ventures, the start-up initiative of technology giant Microsoft on Thursday launched its corporate engagement programme, Innovation for Corporates Initiative (ICI) with an aim of supporting corporate to enhance their engagements with start-ups to attain innovation driven growth.

To start with, ICI will offer three programmes including Market Access Programme (MAP), Partner in Acceleration (PIA) and High Performance (Hi-Po) programme. While MAP will bring together start-ups and enterprise businesses to showcase the latest offering, PIA will allow companies to take advantage of Microsoft’s knowhow, resources and network to set up own engagements with start-ups, including accelerator/incubation programmes, deal flows and events. Hi-Po aims to work with start-ups that are nominated by corporates, to scale up their businesses.

“More and more enterprise businesses are looking at us for guidance, and we are positive that institutionalising our efforts under ICI will help us scale up and help even more businesses,” said Ravi Narayan, Director, Microsoft Ventures, India.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Ventures also announced the graduation of the sixth batch of 11 start-ups who were part of its accelerator programmes —Accelerator Plus and Scale Up. Start-ups that graduated from the four-month Accelerator Plus programme include AdPushUp (enables ad revenue optimisation for web publishers), Frilp (helps find recommendations on businesses/shops/services), iReff (provides recharge plan and offers information), DailyRounds (journal for clinical cases) and Uninstall (which helps companies reduce their applications install rates).

Accelerator Plus and Scale Up were launched in March this year by Microsoft Ventures after running five start-up accelerator batches in the country. The programmes focus on late-stage start-ups.

While Accelerator Plus includes start-ups that have raised seed-level funding and has at least 50 clients in business-to-business (B2B) segment and 20,000 customers in business-to-consumer (B2C), for the Scale Up programme, the start-up must have either received a “large seed-level funding” or have raised funds from a venture capital firm.

Over the past three years, 74 start-ups have graduated from Microsoft Ventures with an average funding of $500.

In 2014, it also partnered with Reliance Industries for their accelerator programme, GenNext Innovation Hub. “We have been able to mentor the startups and help them gain traction very fast. We are looking forward to growing this association as we expand our reach with more Innovation Hubs in future.” said, Vivek Rai Gupta of GenNext Venture Fund.