In May, Microsoft rebranded its Ventures division. The new arm looks for investments and acquisitions in general, rather than accelerating startups.
Yesterday, officials revealed that the Redmond giant has supported thirteen companies to date. Out of these, ten are on the new Microsoft Ventures site.
Microsoft’s Investments
Without further ado, here are the ten companies, complete with Microsoft’s description of each:
- “Aqua (September): Aqua Security is the leading platform provider for securing virtual container applications.
- Kahoot (September): Kahoot is a social learning platform that makes learning awesome by allowing users to create, share, and play fun learning games.
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CognitiveScale (August): CognitiveScale is a machine intelligence software company that brings scalable, practical AI to the enterprise through its industry Cognitive Clouds.
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Layer (July): Layer Offers a messaging stack as a service to power rich messaging experiences in web and mobile applications.
- CrowdFlower (June): CrowdFlower is a data enrichment, data mining, and crowdsourcing company based in San Francisco.
- Helpshift (June): Helpshift is the leading in-app customer support platform for mobile, designed uniquely for the mobile-focused business.
- Outreach (June): Outreach is an enterprise communications platform for sales teams, helping sales people work more efficiently together.
- Rescale (June): Rescale is a cloud platform provider of simulation software and high performance computing (HPC) solutions.
- Comfy (June): Comfy is changing the way people interact with their workplaces. Comfy is occupant-facing, smart building software that delivers on-demand, personalized comfort and productivity in the workplace.
- Team8 (June): A cybersecurity powerhouse, focused on developing disruptive technologies and launching cybersecurity companies to address the world’s toughest cybersecurity problems.”
It’s fairly clear how these companies are of interest to Microsoft. Kahoot furthers the company’s learning goals, for example, and Cognitive scale its AI. The diversity and investments are bound to pay off years down the line.
Ventures has not disclosed the amount of funding given to each.
It’s also unclear who the other three companies are, but Microsoft will probably publish them once all the paperwork and web copy is complete.
Early stage companies can currently apply for funding on the Microsoft Ventures website.
