“Today we celebrate two years since the Microsoft global program for Startups was launched”
Today we celebrate two years since the Microsoft global program for Startups was launched and it is incredible to see how we were iterating and growing together with the B2B startup market in the region… as I said two years ago, our goal was to get startups from the region can scale with Microsoft as a strategic partner beyond our platform and we are achieving it …
During this time, growth in the region was triple digit in terms of startups and applications; it was reaching almost a billion dollars of joint sales (businesses closed by the startups in our portfolio) for our partners; See that this portfolio raised more than 3.5bn in follo-on funding and that we established alliances with some of the most important players in the ecosystem … from WeXchange, which is the space for female entrepreneurs in Latam, to associations of entrepreneurs such as ASEA or investment funds. like LAVCA or ARCAP or partners like NVIDIA and its AI program.
The logic of this is that the ecosystem needs support to grow and we want, as I said two years ago, to be citizens of this ecosystem and that is why we will continue to support it.
Some developments are more punctual than others, for example we create verticals for Quatum Computing and autonomous vehicle startups, we open our sales channels such as the Azure Marketplace and our CSPs … and we also add benefits that are made public today: GitHub Enterprise for all startups of our portfolio and MS Power Platform with access also for all startups in our program
The Github and PowerPlatform thing is something that sounds so logical to me and with so much potential that I am very happy to have launched it, but while we continue testing, iterating and working, our goal is still for us to be the default choice of B2B startups that want to scale … because nobody put together a program like this;)
Note: on Linkedin there is a more formal version of this, but the official announcement is at this link and I recommend reading it or seeing the benefits of the program directly.
In less than two years we managed to work and promote the ecosystem with partners such as SoftBank with whom we promoted DS4ALL to increase training in AI / Data Science, District, the Association for Private Equity Investment in Latin America (LAVCA) , the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and WeXchange (the largest event for female entrepreneurs in Latin America), with whom we constantly work to offer training, tools and technological advice to startups…. thanks for these first two years and onwards and upwards!