Microsoft has revealed that 10 later-stage startups are joining a new batch at its ScaleUp program (formerly Microsoft Accelerator), in Berlin.
The participating startups come from eight European countries and are developing solutions for sectors such as marketing, automotive and medical industries. The program, designed to offer support for Series A startups, shows Microsoft’s commitment to expanding its startup activities with the targeted promotion of AI solutions that could become innovation drivers for Germany.
Microsoft will work with the founders on their growth strategies for four months – with the help of co-selling, access to Microsoft’s international sales and partner network and to the Azure cloud platform without taking shares in exchange. In doing so, Microsoft is promoting technological progress and entrepreneurship for a digitization for all.
“Cooperation with mature startups and established companies represents enormous potential for Germany as a business location. This is why it is particularly important to us to promote innovation, most of all in the area of artificial intelligence, and to build a strong community with our program – in Germany, Europe, and worldwide,” says Iskender Dirik, Managing Director of Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin.
Progress for all: Technological solutions that help the whole industry
Microsoft ScaleUp is aimed at mature, later-stage startups in the expansion phase with completed seed financing, which solve problems in various industries and advance the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. The program’s goal is to support them in their growth. Over the course of four months, ScaleUp offers coaching in the areas of negotiation, sales, talent development and technological scaling with the help of the cloud platform Microsoft Azure.
A jury of Microsoft Executives and venture capitalists (VCs) selected eleven international tech startups for the new Microsoft ScaleUp batch in Berlin:
- Adverity (Austria) – a cloud platform for smart marketing that aggregates and harmonises all available data and so provides marketing teams with better insights as a basis for making decisions.
- Agorize (France) – brings students, designers, developers and startups together on a platform for open innovation challenges. Agorize helps organizations with both innovation and recruiting.
- Be My Eyes (Denmark) – this app helps blind people and people with impaired vision: if they are having visual problems, they can simply ring a volunteer who will “lend” them their eyes and assist them via video call.
- Bestmile (Switzerland) – this startup allows mobility providers to use, manage and optimize fleets of autonomous or conventional human-driven vehicles.
- Processgold (the Netherlands) – uses process mining to make real business processes transparent in companies across all industries. This makes efficiency potential and risks visible and the processes can then be optimized.
- Scortex (France) – this AI-based solution automates quality control in factories. The Scortex deep learning platform integrates a robust imaging solution that can be used to fully automate visual inspections, for example.
- Seerene (Germany) – by analysing the data from various applications, systems and development environments that are used in a company, Seerene can identify potential for optimization, so that software can be developed and rolled out more quickly and efficiently.
- Sword Health (Portugal) – offers an AI-powered digital therapist with which is building the standard of care for the physical rehabilitation industry for the next 50 years, by reducing costs and increasing accountability.
- Ultimate.ai (Finland) – uses deep learning technology to help customer service employees respond to inquiries in real time. The artificial intelligence from ultimate.ai also analyzes old chat records and uses this as a basis for generating reply suggestions.
- Userlane (Germany) – is a navigation system for software and automates user onboarding and employee training. In this way it allows all users to use new software straight away.
Microsoft – driving growth for startups and customers
The program will begin with the first batch week on September 3–7, 2018, in the ScaleUp rooms at Microsoft Berlin. The focus will be on workshops and training sessions, including sessionsn with Holger Klärner and Till Großmaß from McKinsey on the topic of pricing, negotiation expert Daniel Reisner, sales strategist Peter Krauss and talent development expert Matthias Ehrhardt. Participants will also be granted access to Microsoft’s cutting-edge technologies such as the Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft ScaleUp helps enterprise-ready startups to bring their product even closer into line with customer requirements and raise their business to the next level – not least of all with the Corporate Access-Event at the end of the four-month program, at which participants can pitch their solution to large organizations from the Microsoft network. Microsoft ScaleUp is represented in eight locations across the globe: Bangalore, Beijing, London, Seattle, Shanghai, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Berlin.
Microsoft initiative: Digitization for all
In order to boost the potential of innovative technologies, above all artificial intelligence, it is important to have a healthy startup ecosystem in addition to leading industrial companies and strong medium-sized organizations. Microsoft’s activities for entrepreneurs are part of the “digitization for all” initiative. With this initiative, the company is championing the way to enable all people to profit from the progress and opportunities offered by digital society on the basis of digital security. This is based upon trust in digital technologies, which is only possible through transparent action. All of the initiative activities can be found under the hashtag #digitalfueralle.
