“In Microsoft‘s history of engaging with and supporting start-ups, we’ve done a lot of investing, but not a lot of early stage”.
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Microsoft Ventures has been overhauled, though it’s not clear why Microsoft has made a decision to get back into investing – or if the company is in it for the long haul.
You might be thinking at this point – Microsoft Ventures was already a startup accelerator program under the Redmond giant’s wing, then what is it, with this new Venture program!?
On Monday, Microsoft announced the creation of a new early-stage investment group that will focus on startups in the cloud, security, and machine-learning markets. Microsoft Ventures will offer financial, technical and GTM resources to startups.
In this day and age, the largest corporations in the world have their own venture capital arms in order to ensure that they are able to cash in on the different promising start ups that crop up on a regular basis and quite often a unicorn can bring in enormous rewards for the investors in question. It will be led by Nagraj Kashyap, the former Qualcomm Ventures leader, who joined Microsoft earlier this year, and housed within Microsoft’s Business Development team, led by Microsoft executive vice president Peggy Johnson, also a Qualcomm vet.
Interestingly, Microsoft recently said that more than 40 percent of Azure revenue is from startups and ISVs.
Microsoft will of course have a presence in Silicon Valley-that’s unavoidable-but it will also set up shop in Seattle, New York City and Tel Aviv, and has plans to expand geographically going forward.
“Given that the move to the cloud remains the single largest priority for the industry, identifying the bleeding-edge companies who complement and leverage the transition to the cloud is key to our investment thesis”, said Kashyap.
In 2013, that morphed into Microsoft Ventures, which included a venture investing arm, along with the company initiatives that are being rolled into the Microsoft Accelerators.
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Last, Kashyap added that Microsoft Ventures is “not aiming to hit a specific number of investments annually” but we should expect the first wave of investments to be revealed “in the coming days and weeks”. Since the company is planning to invest in startups to complement their technology, so we’ll see initial investments into cloud-based SaaS apps, productivity apps, machine learning and security at the same time.
