Microsoft Ventures in India have announced names of 16 startups who have made it to the final list of their 2014 summer batch.
Here are the startups that have made it to the finals
- Appointy
- App Virality
- Bookpad
- Boutline
- Imly
- InstaSafe
- IntouchApp
- Metaome
- Sliderule
- Voonik
- MyBusTickets.in
- Praxify
- Thinxtream
- Touchfone
- ZingHR
- Zoom
According to the PR sent to us, 6 out of these 16 companies (MyBusTickets.in, Praxify, Thinxstream, Touchfone, ZingHR and Zoom) will be part of their newly launched Accelerator Plus Program, which is tailor made for startups that have customer traction and know their market fairly well, whose needs are vastly different from early stage companies.
Interestingly, except one or two of these startups, most others are not at a early stage. I know for the fact that startups like Instasafe, intouchapp, appointy etc all have launched their products quite some time back and they also have paid customers.
Accelerators, in the strictest sense generally look at startups that are either at POC or pre launch or just launched stage. But looking at list of startups in this batch, it looks like Microsoft Accelerator is changing the rules a bit and looking at startups that already have some traction in the market.
Ravi Narayan, Director, Microsoft Ventures, said explaining the rationale behind the Accelerator Plus Program: “This program is for more mature companies which are closer to VC funding. Most of them have made significant progress, so much so that the startup ecosystem is taking their eyes off them. But we at Microsoft Ventures feel this is the time they need the most help, when from an investor standpoint they are getting ready to graduate into the mainstream. Microsoft Ventures is uniquely positioned with resources to help these companies to roll out products and raise serious capital to fund their growth.”