M12 hosts its inaugural India VC Summit
On June 24th 2019, we hosted the first M12 India VC Summit in Bangalore. We were thrilled to welcome 150 influential leaders from startups and venture capital funds from all over India for an action-packed, all-day event with carefully curated content and exceptional speakers from Microsoft, leading venture funds and startups, as well M12 portfolio founders. The goal of the event was to provide a platform for early-stage founders from India to learn from their peers and top-tier investors on how to build companies that can scale to global markets and achieve outsized successful outcomes. We were also excited to showcase Microsoft’s startup engagement platform and partner-first approach in technology areas such as cloud and edge compute, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and data and analytics. The event garnered significant interest in the Indian community and received solid media coverage.
M12 officially launched its presence in India in January this year with an investment in Innovaccer, an emerging market leader in healthcare data platforms. In the short six months since our investment, we have been able to add significant value to Innovaccer by helping them qualify for the Azure co-sell program, connect Innovaccer’s sales teams with large healthcare customers, work on integrations with complementary Microsoft products, and engage on joint marketing events. M12 is actively looking to invest in the next set of disruptive startups born in India that are poised to become leaders by leveraging Microsoft go-to-market resources to help scale to global markets.
At the M12 India Summit, we were joined on stage by key members of the Microsoft India leadership team — Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, Rajiv Sodhi, Commercial Partner Lead, Global Sales and Marketing, Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer, Microsoft India, and Anil Bhansali, CVP, R&D Cloud & Enterprise — all of whom expressed excitement about M12’s presence in India and being able to leverage the M12 platform to connect closely with the startup and VC community in region.
We are also incredibly grateful for all of the entrepreneurs, fellow VCs and Microsoft business and technical leads that joined us for this day.
Sudheesh Nair, President & CEO of Thoughtspot (previously President of Nutanix) and Jaspreet Singh, CEO & founder of Druva (a newly minted unicorn) provided valuable advice and insider tips about their personal experiences and how they built startups born in India to then become global market leaders, unicorns, and now publicly traded companies.
Candid conversations during panel discussions with tier-1 VC funds — Sanjay Nath, cofounder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, Dev Khare, General Partner at Lightspeed India, Shailesh Lakhani, General Partner at Sequoia India, Alok Goel, General Partner at SAIF Partners, and startup CEOs from Capillary, Darwinbox, Goodera, and Yellow Messenger provided powerful, actionable learnings for the audience.
And Aseem Datar, Senior Director for Azure, and Vipul Aggarwal, Director of Business Development for Cloud and AI shared Microsoft’s partnership strategy and product priorities for their respective areas.
To close out the summit, we hosted panel of startups from the M12 portfolio to discuss their experiences with the fund, with each founder emphasizing the unmatched go-to-market(GTM) resources M12 provides through co-sell programs and access to product and business leaders at Microsoft. Maneesh Joshi, CMO of Incorta, said “I am blown away by how involved M12 and Microsoft has been starting the next day after they closed the deal. We have at least weekly touchpoints with the M12 and Microsoft teams, and they have been a great partner across the board with sales and GTM, recruiting, fundraising, customer introductions, and everything that we have asked for help with.” Deepak Gupta, cofounder & CTO of LoginRadius, Kanav Hasija, cofounder and CTO of Innovaccer, and Prakash Nanduri, cofounder and CEO of Paxata, additionally provided examples of large customer deals that they were able to close alongside Microsoft sales teams.
We are excited about the opportunity to empower entrepreneurs in India through investments, insights and unparalleled access to Microsoft. India continues to be an important region for Microsoft — the country produces best-in-class technical talent and entrepreneurs that are building world-class companies that compete and win on a global scale. We are looking forward to investing in the next set of startups that will grow to be market leaders and also for M12 to have a meaningful lasting impact in the Indian startup ecosystem.
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