BANGALORE: Microsoft Ventures in India today announced the launch of its two new accelerator programs while unveiling its Summer 2015 batch. The two new programs– Accelerator Plus and Scale Up, will focus on helping later stage startups in growing traction.

At the launch, Ravi Narayan, Managing Director, Microsoft Ventures in India along with Samir Kumar, Managing Director, Inventus Capital and Phanindra Sama, Cofounder, Redbus.in unveiled the Summer 2015 batch. The batch comprises of 11 new technology startups – AdPushup, Frilp, iReff, DailyRounds, Uninstall, iBot, FortunePay, CustomerXPs, FlamencoTech, WAGmob and UberLabs.

“The startup ecosystem in India has evolved and with that, comes new challenges. A key issue we’ve identified at the last All India Accelerators & Incubators Meet was that there was little help available for later-stage startups in India. This concurred with similar observations made during the pilot of Accelerator Plus, where we noticed that the 10 later stage startups who went through the pilot program benefitted more from the mentoring and showed better results, faster. This prompted us to bring in new accelerator programs to help the later stage startups,” said Ravi Narayan, Managing Director, Microsoft Ventures in India. The All India Accelerators & Incubators Meet was held at Microsoft Ventures’ semi-annual event ThinkNext in November 2014.

The final 11 emerged after several rounds of shortlisting from the original list of 1,400+ applicants. “Two-third of the applicants have been referred by VCs, Angels and organizations like Nasscom and TiE. This shows that they too feel that we are on the right track, and have the resources and expertise to help these startups.” Ravi added. “We were also surprised to note that there was a spike in applications from later stage startups, 63% startups who applied are already in seed stage.”
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