Microsoft announces eleventh cohort of 14 start-ups for its Accelerator programme

Tech giant **Microsoft** on Wednesday announced its 11th cohort of 14 late-stage start-ups for its ‘Accelerator’ programme to help boost their enterprise readiness and go-to-market (GTM) activities. [caption id=“attachment_3914281” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational Image. Reuters[/caption] The 14 start-ups in the cohort are Clonect, Ace Turtle, VideoKen, Kata.ai, Simplilearn, Udaan, Docswallet, MegDap, Liv.ai, KrypC, i-exceed, GIEOM, Hotelogix and MintM. The start-ups cover diverse markets and sectors like GST-readiness, video processing, Natural Language Processing and **machine learning** , the company said in a statement. The average age of the start-ups is 3.5 years and have raised around $64mn in funding till date. Their company size averages to 80 employees and clock an Average Revenue Rate of $2.6mn. In addition to Microsoft ‘Accelerator’ team, the start-ups will get the opportunity to work with its sales and marketing teams which will help them increase their network base. The ‘ **Accelerator** ’ has also formed strategic partnerships with various corporates including TCS, Temasek and Wipro to help the start-ups with their GTM efforts globally. CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadela during his India visit in February had mentioned that the entrepreneurial energy in the country is ’tremendous’ and Microsoft is ’enthused’ about it. “Every time I come back to India, the thing that grabs you is the entrepreneurial spirit of the place. There are a whole bunch of startups doing really exciting work.”