Microsoft Accelerator And Wipro Enter A Strategic Alliance Under #CoInnovate Programme To Boost Startups

Bengaluru-based Microsoft Accelerator has entered into a partnership with Wipro Limited, an information technology, consulting and business process services company to boost startups by providing them with opportunities to innovate and grow their businesses.

The announcement was made at the accelerator’s flagship event – Think Next 2016. The event also marked the graduation of 13 startups from its ninth cohort. According to an official statement, the average age of the graduating startups is 4.5 years, whereas some of them were launched as early as 2008. A few of the lot have already achieved more than $2Mn (INR 13 Cr) revenue.

Commenting on the development, Bala Girisaballa, CEO-In-Residence, Microsoft Accelerator said, “Microsoft Accelerator #CoInnovate programme bridges the gap between corporates and startups. Connecting startups to corporates and crafting a win-win relationship is a critical need of the ecosystem today. The partnership with Wipro allows us to leverage our combined strengths and market reach to provide a whole new level of market access for our startups.”

The newly established partnership is a part of the accelerator’s #CoInnovate programme which provides startups with go-to-market opportunities by working with enterprise businesses. According to an official statement, Wipro will also refer selected startups for Microsoft Accelerator programmes and events.

Under the terms of the partnership, referred startups will gain access to ‘Wipro Open Innovation’ initiatives, including a global go-to-market reach to rapidly scale up, access to integrate their respective solutions with Wipro Solutions, assistance in building a global customer base, and enhanced marketing support for proactive business opportunities, among others.

Commenting on the partnership, K.R. Sanjiv, Chief Technology Officer, Wipro Limited said, “Wipro has built strong connects in the global startup ecosystem, over the last three years, as part of our focus on building new open innovation capabilities. We are confident that our partnership with Microsoft Accelerator will be an important enabler in developing critical solutions for our customers, harnessing both the innovation taking place within Wipro and the external ecosystem.”

This alliance will allow startups an access to the innovative technology solutions emerging from the selected technology startups in the country. In addition, they will get a robust technology solution backed by the delivery and support platform provided by Microsoft and Wipro.

The 13 startups that graduated are:

Whodat: Whodat is an augmented reality company, with its primary thrust areas being building products that harness the power of technologies to help people visualise products to consumers so that they can make informed decisions.

Uncanny Vision: It is a B2B startup that functions in the area of AI-based computer vision for IoT devices like surveillance cameras.

Talview: Talview offers video-mobile recruitment and assessment technology solutions that facilitates businesses workforce by reviewing candidates. It essentially aims at replacing the traditional hiring process. It has provided services in 102 countries.

Transaction Analysts: It is a fintech startup that aims to bring affordable digital payment services to Indian citizens through its digital partner network using unique strategic licenses from RBI, Aadhaar, NPCI, and product IPs.

Surukam: It provides AI solutions (NLP and machine learning) to manage drafting, redlining as well as post-contract management of contracts.

MoveInSync: It works in the areas of managing employee transportation. It comes with SaaS that aims at making transportation efficient, transparent, and safe. It is presently used by 100,000 employees across 40 enterprises including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Wipro, Oracle, etc.

Allizhealth: The platform addresses information on non-communicable and lifestyle related diseases. It also enables its users to figure their health risks early and use various resources to track and manage the same. At present, it is being used by over 500,000 users and insurance and health care providers in India.

Betaout: Betaout is an ecommerce-based B2C marketing softwarethat lets users communicate via personalised email, on-site engagement, SMS, mobile push, and cart recovery with their customers.

Epictions: It is a data analytics company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to create content and digital PRs.

Faircent: It is a P2P loan platform which enables lenders and borrowers to connect with each other after registering on the platform. The company’s platform allows users to know the borrower by their profession, caste, and mother tongue.

FarEye: It is a SaaS-enabled mobility platform for business operations. FarEye aims to optimise businesses by moving their operations to mobile.

Germin8: It is a social media-based platform that collects and analyses conversations in real-time from public and private sources, whereby it converts them into industry-specific insights and analytics.

Meddiff Technologies: It is a tech-enabled healthcare platform that focusses on product development. Its products include Teleradiology, Picture Archiving and Communication Systems. Meddiff has built six applications till date.

In addition to this, Microsoft also hosted the third edition of ‘All India Accelerators & Incubators Meet’, where it aimed to bring together 35+ accelerators and incubation partners to boost the startups.

The event also hosted a panel discussion with speakers like Sharad Sharma, fellow iSPIRT, VCs Shekhar Kirani, (Accel Partners) & Samir Kumar (Inventus Capital), and Aditya Sood, Sr. Director Engineering & Products, Nutanix, among others. The panelists deliberated on the need for Indian startups to globally scale themselves and talked about the potential of India as a market for growth. Before the main event, Microsoft presented a curated set of startups to a selected audience of investors, CMOs and ecommerce businesses in a session called VC Speed Dating and two Market Access Programs.

Microsoft Accelerator is currently accepting applications for its 10th cohort, which is scheduled to start in February 2017.