Microsoft announces programme for agritech startups in India

PTI, Jun 3, 2020, 2:40 PM IST

Bengaluru: Microsoft announced on Wednesday the launch of a programme for agritech startups in India that it said are committed to driving transformation in agriculture.

It is designed to help startups build industry-specific solutions, scale and grow with access to deep technology, business and marketing resources, the company said in a statement.

Agritech startups in India are transforming agriculture by developing innovative digital solutions to maximise productivity, improve market linkages, increase supply chain efficiency and provide greater access to inputs for agri-businesses, according to the company.

Start-ups can also get access to Azure FarmBeats, which can help them focus on core value-adds instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of data engineering, the statement said.

Available on the Azure Marketplace, Azure FarmBeats enables aggregation of agricultural datasets across providers and generation of actionable insights by building AI/ML models based on fused datasets, it said.

Qualified Seed to Series C startups can boost their businesses with Azure benefits (including free credits), unlimited technical support and help with Azure Marketplace onboarding, the company said.

Startups with enterprise-ready solutions can scale quickly with joint go-to-market strategies, technical support and new sales opportunities with Microsoft’s partner ecosystem. Startups that are looking to create digital agriculture solutions have the opportunity to co-build customised solutions with Azure FarmBeats without investing in deep data engineering resources, the statement added.