The Microsoft ScaleUp program 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 seven 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 Managing Director Iskender Dirik twice a year supports a batch of up to 10 startups with coaching, training and technical support. In this blog series we will introduce one of the participating startups from our third batch each Tuesday and Thursday.
Agorize is a startup founded in 2011 by Charles Thou, Yohann Melamed and Yohan Attal and is now the leading online platform for open innovation challenges. The company helps businesses to innovate and identify the best talent by connecting them with a global community of five million innovators, consisting of students, developers, startups and employees.
The biggest challenge for Agorize before being part of the ScaleUp program was to gain market shares and to grow the team. “Both is getting better now”, says Maxence. “Thanks to the excellent program and great Microsoft ScaleUp team in Berlin, we learned a lot about soft and hard skills for our daily business. Also, the speakers and workshops covering the topics expansion and development have been super helpful since these are currently the most important topics for us.” The startups next steps are to grow the team, improve the product and to become a global player.
Learn more about Agorize and about what makes the startup so successful in our video interview with Noémie Maxence, Customer Success Manager at Agorize:
Agorize developed five types of challenges depending on the community one wants to work with, to help create new synergies between businesses and key players in innovation: student challenge, online hackathon, startup challenge and internal challenge. “We help big companies to face digital transformation through online challenges that work like digital hackathons but do last three months instead of 24 hours”, says Noémie Maxence, Customer Success Manager at Agorize. “We get 1,000 participants involved online, which means more people and more advanced prototypes.” Right now, they connect businesses with innovators across 145 countries and have offices in France, Germany, the United States, China and Canada. Some of their international clients are Microsoft, Airbus and Uber.
