Microsoft plans to help Agri-tech startups with its new programs

Technology giant Microsoft is betting big on India. Not only they are actively supporting IIT Delhi students to develop COVID-19 related solutions, but they are now looking to help agritech startups in India. The newly announced programs will help startups to build industry-specific solutions, scale, and grow with access to deep technology, business, and marketing resources.

Agriculture focused tech startups are the new thing in India. The majority of the Indian workforce is related either directly or indirectly to agriculture. This is where Microsoft steps in, providing the best-in-class tech and business enablement resources to help these startups innovate and scale.

Spread across three tiers, these are the business and tech-related resource benefits for startups :

• Startups qualified to Seed C will be able to boost their business with Azure benefits (including free credits), unlimited technical support, and help with Azure Marketplace onboarding.
• Startups with enterprise-ready solutions will be able to scale quickly with joint go-to-market strategies, technical support, and new sales opportunities with Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.
• Startups that have an idea and want to develop solutions in the agritech field will have the opportunity to co-build customized solutions with Azure FarmBeats without investing in deep data engineering resources. Azure FarmBeats is a cloud platform developed by Microsoft with which startups can acquire, aggregate, and process agricultural data and rapidly develop their own AI/ML models.

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft is building a platform where everyone from startups, corporates to governments, and venture capital firms will be able to collaborate and develop solutions.

Agritech, in India, has received more than $248 million funding in the first half of 2019, a growth of 300 percent as compared to the same period in the previous year. With more than 450 startups in the agritech sector, and now Microsoft on board, the sector is all set to boom.