 "The Indian startups that made it to Microsoft Ventures' scale-up programme")
Microsoft Ventures has a unique program for the Indian start-up ecosystem: mentorship for late-stage start-ups. The thinking behind it is that start-ups in India now have many avenues for seed and series A funding as well as early stage incubation. It’s in the growth stage that they are running into problems.
Today it announced a list of 10 start-ups that made the cut from over 1,800 which applied for the winter batch of this programme.
Here are a few of the start-ups which are part of the scale-up and hi-po program, in alphabetical order:
CanvasFlip from Hyderabad is a cloud-based prototyping and usability testing platform. Earlier this week, it announced seed funding of $1.2 million from Silicon Valley-based Bessemer Venture Partners. It has over 140 enterprise customers, including Paytm, MakeMyTrip, and Tech Mahindra.
Channelyst
Bangalore-based Channelyst, funded by BitChemy Ventures, helps organisations with a channel strategy to find the right distribution partners for specific markets. Established by IIT-IIM alumni Anterpreet Singh and Anish Basu Roy, who both worked at Nokia before, it claims to have profiled over 50,000 channel partners.
CloudCherry
Chennai-based CloudCherry’s software-as-a-service product helps brands track their customers in real time and act quickly and intelligently on feedback. Its first external funding came from The Chennai Angels and IDG Ventures three months ago. Co-founder and CEO Vinod Muthukrishnan is a BITS Pilani alumnus who cut his teeth on managing sales teams for Market Simplified in the US, Germany, and India.
Flutura
Three former employees of IT major MindTree in Bengaluru – Krishnan Raman, Derick Jose, and Srikanth Muralidhar – started Flutura to leverage their expertise in big data and machine learning. Its proprietary algorithms and models help focus the firehose of machine data in different verticals – from oil rigs and power grids to telecom and smart buildings – for alerts and intelligent decision-making.
