Mukund Mohan, CEO-in-Residence, Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure (India), said: “Our program helps early stage startups accelerate their dreams of building lighthouse companies from India, on Cloud, Internet and Mobile. Any application that can leverage these technologies, eg e-commerce, mobile, media, social applications, gaming, education, healthcare, etc, can apply. We look for three criteria when we shortlist---the team, the innovation and the business viability of the idea. Once a startup has these in place, our Accelerator provides all possible support to help them fulfill their dreams.”
The winter batch would be the third at the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure (India), and the second in calendar year 2013. The summer batch of 13 startups are currently present at the Accelerator. Sharing his experience of leading this batch, Mukund said: We have applied the learnings from the first batch to make some significant changes in our incubation process. Among other things, we are adding more seed stage/ angel investors to our list of mentors, focusing more on product definition and product roadmap, strengthening the validation steps for customer connection, and providing stronger UX support to the teams. In the last one and half months, the teams have made rapid progress, and I am very hopeful of seeing some very strong and confident companies emerge when this batch graduates in end June.”
About Microsoft India:
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software - any time, any place and on any device. Microsoft Corporation (India) Private Ltd is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation, USA. It has had a presence in India since 1990 and currently has offices in nine cities - Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune.
