Microsoft to fund smart city start-ups: Satya Nadella

Mumbai: Nearly two years into his reign as CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella on Thursday put on show the ‘new’ Microsoft he has helped evolve by rediscovering its “sense of purpose”. That purpose, he said speaking at the company’s Future Unleashed conference in Mumbai, is to “empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more”.

Talking up the start-up boom, he announced that MS was launching a special programme, as part of the Modi government’s Smart Cities initiative, to provide its Azure cloud platform to start-ups that are trying to solve urban problems such as education, healthcare, logistics and energy.

The initiative is anticipated to impact over 50 smart cities in the next year through a catalogue of over 50 start- ups and ISV solutions, the company said.

Describing the pace of growth of ecommerce and start-up ecosystem as “pretty mind boggling,” Mr Nadela said he is not worried about the valuation part of this segment as Microsoft is not looking at acquisitions, but is looking at the quality of ideas these entrepreneurs have.

Hyderabad-born Nadella also announced new partnerships with e-commerce players Justdial, PayTm and Snapdeal.