Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin – meet Starmind

The Microsoft ScaleUp program (previously known as Microsoft Accelerator) is designed for Series A startups and offers access to sales, marketing and technical support. Eligible startups partake in the immersive program at one of our eight global locations followed by ongoing support from a dedicated team of success managers. One of the ScaleUp locations is Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin, where a dedicated team around MD Iskender Dirik twice a year support a batch of up to 10 startups with dedicated coaching, training and technical support. In this blog series we will introduce one of the participating StartUps each Tuesday.

Starmind, founded 2010 in Zurich, is one of Europe’s leading AI Tech companies which focuses on building self-learning networks to access human expertise.

The company uses AI to automatically identify the experts within an organization. Whenever you have a question and don’t know who to ask for example, Starmind finds the right expert to help you solve your problem.

With regards to its partnership with Microsoft, Marc Vontobel, Co-Founder & CTO at Starmind believes that the ScaleUp program “…helps us to escape from our daily routines and to think about important topics. It also helps us to grow – not just in the market but also on the personal side.”

60 seconds with Starmind

Starmind participated together with nine different Tech-Startups at the Microsoft ScaleUp Batch Week in Berlin. We have asked them some questions about the collaboration with Microsoft and their new learnings.

How are you involved with Microsoft ScaleUp?
The Microsoft ScaleUp team has put together a very exciting mix of workshops and training sessions. Every single event I participated in was fascinating and got me thinking about how I could improve. Some workshops even resulted in a direct initiative on our side.

What was the biggest challenge for you before the start of the program – and have you overcome it yet?
We were far away from a typical Microsoft technology stack. That’s also why we didn’t adopt Azure before the program. The ScaleUp team helped us getting into Azure quickly and tackled the challenges hands-on.

What areas did the ScaleUp Batch Week help you the most?
On the technological side, the deep dive into the whole Azure landscape helped us a lot to get up to speed. On the marketing side, the hands-on value proposition workshops helped us sharpen our communication documents. On the individual side, the personality tests and discussion of the results were very insightful.”

What are your next steps?
The potential leverage of a Starmind integration into Office 365 or Microsoft Teams are tremendous. We’re still at the beginning of the journey and will invest a lot of resources into this unique opportunity. On the market side, we’re exiting to co-sell and do co-marketing together with Microsoft!”

This blog post is part of a series of participants of the Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin Batch March-June 2018.

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