Microsoft for Startups

Ready to break through with enterprise customers? Join us in London for an interactive session designed to help AI founders navigate complex sales cycles, build credibility, and accelerate enterprise adoption. Plus, bring your GTM challenges and pressure-test your strategy in real time. 📅 October 20 📍 London ⏰ 9 AM BST 🎟️ Space is limited. Request your spot by October 14: https://msft.it/6047asaIH

What are you most curious to learn at Microsoft Ignite? 💡 The startup sessions cover everything from building reliable agents to scaling adoption, strengthening governance, and automating customer service. Which topic sparks your curiosity most? Browse the full lineup in the first comment to plan your schedule. #MSIgnite #MicrosoftForStartups #AI #Startups

Building AI for enterprise customers means thinking about how they’ll validate and oversee it. 🔎 ShiSh S. looks at independent validation and visibility into agents beyond a company’s own environment through the work of 21 startups in our Microsoft for Startups Pegasus portfolio. For founders, it’s a way to spot customer needs your product could address and questions to prepare for in enterprise conversations. ⬇️ #MicrosoftForStartups #Enterprisecustomers #AI #Agents

Two top AI companies. Two incredible milestones. 🚀 Huge congratulations to Microsoft for Startups Pegasus portfolio companies Ascerta and Stuut on two major funding announcements! 🔥 Ascerta raised an $18M Series A, led by Dell Technologies Capital → It's been great to see them evolve from helping enterprises manage their AI costs to helping them measure the business value of AI. → And their early results are impressive: - 47% improvement in AI initiative ROI - 86% reduction in wasted AI spend - 24% reduction in agent launch time → As enterprises scale AI from pilots to hundreds of agents and solutions, the problem they're solving is only going to continue becoming increasingly important. 🔥 Stuut raised a $52.5M Series B, just 10 months after its Series A, led by Insight Partners with M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund participating. → And the numbers behind the growth are pretty remarkable: - 5x year-over-year customer growth - $3B+ in enterprise customer receivables managed - 47% reduction in days sales outstanding for customers - 40% improvement in cash flow → What started with automating accounts receivable is becoming something much bigger: They're proving AI agents can run the entire order-to-cash process, turning unpaid invoices into cash in the bank. But my favorite part of these announcements is still watching the PEOPLE behind the companies succeed. Both teams have been building with an incredible level of customer obsession, and it is exciting to see that translate into growth. Two very different companies: - Ascerta is helping companies understand and prove whether AI is creating value. - Stuut is using AI agents to directly create that value inside financial workflows. But both share something important: a relentless focus on measurable customer outcomes, not AI for AI's sake. Huge congratulations to David Tepper, Erik Winters, Doron Holan and the Ascerta team, and to Tarek Alaruri, Ben Winter, Adam Chaarawi and the Stuut team! If youre a CIO, CFO or AI leader dealing with either of these problems, let me know if you'd like an introduction to their incredible teams 🙌

Your AI agent opened a pull request. Who’s responsible for what happens next? 👀 For Yuval Hazaz, co-founder and CEO of Overcut, that question gets to the heart of building AI agents enterprises can trust. In our latest #FounderFriday, he shares what early deployments taught his team about human oversight, workflows that learn from mistakes, and why a great demo doesn’t always translate into a product customers will adopt. His advice to founders: “Build for the second year, not the demo.” Read the conversation 👇 #MicrosoftForStartups #AIStartups #AgenticAI #Moats

Winning your first customers is a milestone. Building a repeatable enterprise sales strategy is the next challenge. 🚀 Join Kelvin Keane, Tom Davis, and our #MicrosoftforStartups team in London for practical insights on enterprise pricing, reaching the right buyers, and growing beyond your initial customers. With Seb Johnson hosting the discussion and Replit delivering a live demo, there’ll be plenty to put into practice. Find the details and registration link below. We’d love to see you there! #AIStartups #EnterpriseSales #GoToMarket #LondonTech #LondonStartups

Next week I'm hosting an event with Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Replit on how AI companies should sell to enterprises. The aim of the session is to help startups break into and successfully sell to enterprise customers. We're going to be hearing from the likes of: 🚀 Tom Davis: GM at Microsoft for Startups 🚀 Ben Kiziltug: VP of sales at n8n 🚀 Julien Codorniou: GP at 20VC As well as breaking into roundtables to get into the details. The event is next Tuesday morning. If you're interested you can sign up here: https://lnkd.in/ednP_RvG

Building with AI is getting easier. Building an advantage that lasts takes more. 💡 Heena Purohit, Director of AI Startups at #MicrosoftforStartups, shares three areas where founders can strengthen their competitive edge: workflows, proprietary data and learning, and trusted distribution. Discover the practical patterns she’s seeing through her work with our startups and what they could mean for your startup’s future. What’s your 12-month moat? Read Heena’s insights below. 👇 #AIStartups #StartupGrowth #CompetitiveAdvantage #Entrepreneurship

What does it take to bring AI agents into real enterprise engineering workflows? For our next #FounderFriday, Overcut co-founder and CEO Yuval Hazaz joins Microsoft for Startups’ Heena Purohit to talk loop engineering, trusted automation, and building AI workflows with governance and human oversight. 📅 October 23 ⏰ 10 AM PT | 1 PM ET 🎙️ Join the conversation and hear what it takes to build AI agents for the enterprise. 👇 #MicrosoftForStartups #AI #AIAgents #Startups

What does the right startup partnership look like beyond technology? We caught up with Ferrum Health’s Austin Deer to hear about the company’s experience with Microsoft for Startups and our Pegasus program, including working with Sally Ann Frank to connect with Microsoft customers and help drive further adoption of its clinical applications. 🎥 Hear more about Ferrum Health’s experience 👇 https://msft.it/6044al2dr