Microsoft Ventures, a global initiative by Microsoft Corp., in a bid to foster entrepreneurship, has announced 16 startups that will be a part of the 2014 summer batch of its accelerator programme in India.
The accelerator programme helps early stage companies and first-time entrepreneurs with mentoring, technical guidance and networking, enabling the founders to build a product in 3-6 months.
The 16 startups selected for Summer batch 2014 are Appointy, App Virality, Bookpad, Boutline, Imly, InstaSafe, IntouchApp, Metaome, Sliderule, Voonik, MyBusTickets.in, Praxify, Thinxtream, Touchfone, ZingHR and Zoom.
Six of the 16 startups which are already having some customer traction, a fair idea of their market and are closer to venture capital funding are also going to be part of Microsoft’s newly-launched Accelerator Plus Program.
These six startups will be:
MyBusTickets.in: An online bus ticket booking platform
Praxify: An online healthcare venture for doctors, patients and hospitals
Thinxtream: Provides DeviceMaestro Smart, an intelligent, secure and open machine-to-machine (M2M) application enabling organisations to implement their M2M strategy
Touchfone: Provides an instant messaging platform called Chat n Play
ZingHR: An HR management software for SMEs as well as large organizations
Zoom: A membership-based, self-drive car rental service.
Microsoft Ventures in India partners with industry bodies to support the startup community and widen its reach. The following four startups from the latest batch were selected at events organized by one of their industry partners, NASSCOM:
Bookpad: Provides an enterprise product called docspad.com that enables customers to provide preview, edit and manage any documents on their cloud – right in their application user interface.
Boutline: It lets one set up social tasks and challenges for an event audience and enables him/her reward the audience for influencing the masses.
Imly: An online aggregator of home chefs. The portal is a full-fledged marketplace currently offering 1,265 recipes provided by over 150 home chefs from 10 cities.
Praxify: An online healthcare venture for doctors, patients and hospitals
The other start-ups that have been selected to be part of the four-month-long accelerator programme in Bangalore are:
Appointy: A scheduling software that helps businesses to schedule appointments, accept pre-payments, send reminder alerts, update social networks and personal calendars, create promotions, create discount coupons, manage and grow virally.
App Virality: A solution that lets one’s app go viral on social media, increase the number of app downloads, and identify the top influencers and communicate with them.
Metaome: A Big Data company for the life sciences space. Its flagship product, called DistilBio, combines graph search and data integration technologies to accelerate drug discovery by connecting across diverse data in life sciences.
SlideRule: An online learning solution that helps one discover the world’s best online courses in every subject.
Voonik: A stylist-handpicked online fashion store.
IntouchApp: Enables the user to automatically view up-to-date information of his/her contacts on mobile as well as online.
InstaSafe: It aims to make it simple and safe for companies to securely access enterprise-provisioned on-premise applications, public and private clouds, from anywhere.
The fourth batch received over 850 applications directly in a period of over two months. The startups will graduate in May. Microsoft neither provides any funding assistance nor does it take a stake in the companies participating in the programme.
About 80% of 35 startups, which have graduated from Microsoft Ventures in India since August 2012, have received funding. Two of them, Adepto and Plustxt have already been acquired.
Microsoft Accelerators currently operates in Bangalore, Berlin, Beijing, London, Paris and Tel Aviv.
