Microsoft Ventures, an early stage investment arm of the global software maker, is on verge of making its first investment in any Indian startup and the startup is Hyderabad-based NowFloats which focuses on helping businesses create, update and market their location-tagged websites by simply just sending an SMS.
If everything put in right place Microsoft Venture will be making an investment of up to $2,50,000 in NowFloats. The Hyderabad startup was incubated at Microsoft's Bangalore-based accelerator and has lately launched a mobile app, which allows users to discover businesses and deals, based on their location.
Apart from Bangalore, India Microsoft Ventures operates five accelerators across the globe, including Beijing, Berlin, London, Paris and Tel Aviv and has so far, invested in 10 startups around the globe through its seed fund and this will be, as said earlier, first investment in India by Microsoft venture.
Microsoft Ventures investment in NowFloats is expected to be completed by end-August as by reports by Economics Times.
As per NowFloats - 9.6 million small and medium businesses need a website and only 0.6 million have one, remaining 9 million tasks on our desk and that's just in India.
Recently in Global Startup Day in San Francisco presented by Microsoft Ventures, it chose NowFloats among top 3 favourite startup across the globe that MV has mentored under its startup accelerator programs. General Manager of Microsoft Ventures, Rahul Sood talked about mentoring companies from around the world to bring creativity, engineering and business together and he say NowFloat is one of them.
NowFloats, in addition to SMS support also have an Android and iOS apps that support image uploading and Jasminder Singh Gulati, CEO and Co-founder of NowFloats announced a partnership with Microsoft to embed the service on Huawei Windows phones in Africa to help get local businesses online.
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