One incredible idea. That’s how most startups come into this world. But no matter how revolutionary, a brilliant idea alone can’t guarantee success.
Beyond the original spark of inspiration, startups need to ensure that they do everything in their power to set themselves up for victory. Connections, resources, expertise, training, management and more, are all necessary for that original seed of innovation to flourish and grow.
The Microsoft Accelerator program, which runs in seven locations across the world, aims to support startups by giving them the tools, resources, connections, and knowledge they need to take their great ideas to the next level.
Over the years, the Accelerator program has seen 647 startups, with a total of more than $3 billion in funding raised, with a shift to focusing on early-stage companies who want to go beyond the development of their product by scaling up every aspect of the business.
Throughout the program and after graduation, the Microsoft Accelerator acts as an invaluable resource, providing startups with connections to Microsoft’s global network of customers, partners, business mentors and technical experts, setting ambitious startups up with the very best chances of expansion and success.
Berlin Accelerator
The Microsoft Accelerator in Berlin has evolved. This year, the focus is on a selection of startups which have already obtained Series A funding, with a particular emphasis set on deep tech companies with a focus on data, rooted in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), Mixed Reality (MR), and block chain.
It’s important to emphasise that Microsoft’s investment in these chosen startups goes well beyond mere funding and assistance with technology – it provides a rich set of business enablement capabilities and ongoing support as these startups mature and grow.
Microsoft’s key opportunity as a world-leading technology company is to share the breadth of its resources, delivered to startups at key stages of their development.
The ten selected startups in the Berlin Accelerator will embark on an intensive four-month program dedicated to supporting them as they mature and scale up their operations. This includes:
- Access to Microsoft’s sales and marketing support engines
- Tech support – consulting and sparring
- Executive coaching
- $500,000 granted in Microsoft Azure credits
Iskender Dirik, MD at Microsoft for Startups comments that “We started with a new team and have built a new Growth Acceleration format in Berlin within just three months. We are more than happy that we were able to position our new program in the startup and VC scene and attract fantastic, mature tech companies with an average funding of $7 million per company. We’re excited to help our startups to scale within the next months.”
Meet the new cohort
Below are the ten startups selected for this year’s Berlin accelerator cohort:
BigchainDB
Imagine knowing the authenticity of everything you touch. To know everything about the materials, manufacturing, delivery and usage. That’s the level of authentication made possible with blockchain technology. BigchainDB takes this technology and lets users execute data-driven blockchain use cases. Starting with the scale and queryability benefits of modern databases, BigchainDB then adds the blockchain characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and native assets. BigchainDB is for enterprises that want to implement data driven use cases without sacrificing scale, security or performance.
Building Radar
Building Radar is the only real-time search engine for construction projects worldwide, allowing users to save up to 80% on research time, letting them spot construction sites months before their competitors. The service allows the tracking of their progress from planning to realisation, allowing the selling of products at the optimum time. Building Radar’s customers are at home in the most diverse sectors in the construction industry, ranging from DAX corporations to medium-sized enterprises, such as world-renowned brands Viessmann or Vitra.
Crate.io
CrateDB is an open source and enterprise SQL database purpose built for machine-data use-cases. It uniquely combines massive and horizontal scale out, real-time, document database characteristics with a Standard SQL interface. Crate allows processing massive amounts of machine/IoT data in real-time in the cloud and on the edge. More than 800 clusters are running already with Crate, which enables use-cases as real-time backed for Industrial/Consumer IoT, Security, Geospatial and Logdata. Customers in the Silicon Valley (Skyhigh, Qualtrics, Stackrox, Fullpower, NBC) and many in Europe power their applications with CrateDB´s distributed SQL engine.
Giant Swarm
Giant Swarm is democratizing modern software infrastructure that is used by Google, Facebook and other webscale companies to run agile, resilient, distributed systems at scale. Giant Swarm provides the best way to run microservices, within Docker containers on top of Kubernetes clusters, both on-premises and in the cloud. Giant Swarm ensures that the infrastructure is operational and up-to-date at all times, so customers can focus on their applications. Customers include some of the world’s leading organizations such as Fortune 500 insurances, retailers, software vendors and telcos.
LeanIX
LeanIX helps companies become digital champions in their industry. With their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application, companies take better and faster decisions on how to constantly optimize their IT architecture. LeanIX establishes the 360-degree transparency needed to reduce IT complexity in the IT landscape, ensuring compliance and enabling growth through adopting state-of-the-art technology. More than 80 leading brands such as Adidas, DHL, Merck or Zalando trust LeanIX and its innovative solution.
nyris
At nyris, a state of the art image recognition engine is developed using the latest AI solutions and deep learning frameworks. The company provides its technology as SaaS to retail and industry. Its unique concept enables it to deliver the fastest and most accurate results for 1D (codes), 2D (print2web) and 3D (real world products) in one API. It can search 500, 500,000 or 500 million product or object images without losing matching speed (< 1 sec) or performance.
So1
So1 offers a completely new approach to price promotions in the consumer goods industry. This approach allows manufacturers and retailers to reach individual consumers with individual price promotions and achieve an ROI that exceeds levels conventionally attainable by as much as a factor of ten. The technology of the So1 Engine, based on cutting edge econometric methods, precisely calculates the price reduction required in order to induce potentially valuable customers to switch brands or retailers. The price promotions calculated by So1 in this manner can then be delivered by means of wide-reach mobile applications and digital printing.
Styla
Styla is a next generation CMS SaaS technology. It builds on two core-trends that leverage today’s commerce business: inspiring users and converting them to buyers. Styla offers a revolutionary design automation of content and combines it with seamless shopping opportunities. It enables companies to concentrate their resources on crafting compelling stories and winning the hearts of their customers rather than on coding and designing.
Tellmeplus
Leveraging years of research in the field of artificial intelligence applied to predictive analytics, Tellmeplus is a software vendor specialized in AI applied to big data. The Predictive Objects platform leverages the latest advances in big data & machine learning to provide Automated Embedded Artificial Intelligence. Tellmeplus’ technology places the intelligence where decisions need to be made: in the objects.
Trufa
Trufa finds operational performance improvements worth billions in profits, price and working capital. The Trufa Performance Management Machine learns about correlations between operational activities and financial outcomes, identifying business drivers and recommending actions. The company uses existing transactional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) data to form leading indicators for every business situation automatically, without the need for manually crafted models or data scientists. For users, everything happens on the fly.
