Meet the 10 mature Indian startups that made the cut in MS Ventures’ scale-up program

Microsoft Ventures has a unique program for the Indian startup ecosystem: mentorship for late-stage startups. The thinking behind it is that startups in India now have many avenues for seed and series A funding as well as early stage incubation. It’s in the growth stage that they are running into problems.

Many promising startups die a premature death without adequate guidance and follow-up funding. MS Ventures believes it is well-placed with its global connections and deep tech expertise to fill this gap. Hence its accelerator program in India introduced a “scale-up” segment earlier this year.

Today it announced a list of 10 startups that made the cut from over 1,800 which applied for the winter batch of this program. They comprise two series-A-funded startups and eight others that have raised over US$1 million in funding. Three of them – TripHobo, VakilSearch, and VigyanLabs – are already well-established in the market. For them, there’s a special “Hi-Po” program of mentorship and access to new markets, partners, customers, and technology.

Here is a run-down of the 10 startups which are part of the scale-up and hi-po program, in alphabetical order:

CanvasFlip

CanvasFlip from Hyderabad is a cloud-based prototyping and usability testing platform. Earlier this week, it announced seed funding of US$1.2 million from Silicon Valley-based Bessemer Venture Partners. It has over 140 enterprise customers, including Paytm, MakeMyTrip, and Tech Mahindra.

Channelyst

Bangalore-based Channelyst, funded by BitChemy Ventures, helps organizations with a channel strategy to find the right distribution partners for specific markets. Established by IIT-IIM alumni Anterpreet Singh and Anish Basu Roy, who both worked at Nokia before, it claims to have profiled over 50,000 channel partners.

CloudCherry

Chennai-based CloudCherry’s software-as-a-service product helps brands track their customers in real time and act quickly and intelligently on feedback. Its first external funding came from The Chennai Angels and IDG Ventures three months ago. Co-founder and CEO Vinod Muthukrishnan is a BITS Pilani alumnus who cut his teeth on managing sales teams for Market Simplified in the US, Germany, and India.

Flutura

Knolskape

Teewe

TripHobo

VakilSearch

VigyanLabs

Vymo