Microsoft for Startups
VC Fund
Redmond, United States
Microsoft for Startups is a VC fund in Redmond focused on Software and Artificial Intelligence. Microsoft for Startups provides cloud services and software to help startups grow faster.
- Total investments:
- 170
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 34%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Microsoft for Startups invests in
SoftwareArtificial IntelligenceInformation TechnologySaaSMachine Learning
Stages Microsoft for Startups invests in
Non-equity AssistanceGrantSeedPre-SeedFunding Round
Countries Microsoft for Startups invests in
United StatesIndiaUnited KingdomUnited Arab EmiratesCanada
Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
| See all 9 contacts → | |||
Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 58 (34%)
- Artificial Intelligence 42 (25%)
- Information Technology 37 (22%)
- SaaS 27 (16%)
- Machine Learning 17 (10%)
Stage
- Non-equity Assistance 49 (29%)
- Grant 41 (24%)
- Seed 32 (19%)
- Pre-Seed 25 (15%)
- Funding Round 10 (6%)
Country
- United States 54 (32%)
- India 15 (9%)
- United Kingdom 9 (5%)
- United Arab Emirates 8 (5%)
- Canada 3 (2%)
Team
| Name | Title | Investments | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Ayush Garg
Partner via GrocShop- BizSpark Mentee
|
Partner via GrocShop- BizSpark Mentee | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Giuseppe Cristiano De Bernardo
Associate
|
Associate | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Himanshu Sharma
Founder's Hub
|
Founder's Hub | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Israel Blechman
Digital Marketing Mentor
|
Digital Marketing Mentor | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Mario Fontana
Head
|
Head | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
| See all 9 team members → | ||||
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cruq AI is a platform for building, running, and owning production AI agents. It is built for teams that want durable agents they actually control, rather than a black-box chatbot or a service they can never take with them.Cruq AI, an agent is a versioned graph of prompts, tools, and model calls. Teams design agents visually or in code, run themin production, and keep every run, trace, tool call, and byte of memory. The platform's core thesis is ownership: customers bring their own model provider keys (OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others), so they pay providers directly at cost, switch or compare models without re-platforming, and avoid per-credit lock-in to a single vendor.The platform includes the parts that decide whether an agent survives contact with real users: guardrails (PII, regex, keyword, length, and JSON-schema) on both input and output, long-term semantic memory, retrieval-augmented knowledge bases built from uploaded documents, eval suites and scored experiments for comparing models and prompts, and full observability of tokens, cost, and latency per run. Everything is accessible programmatically through a tenant-scoped REST API, an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, and OAuth 2.0, so agents and other software can drive the platform directly.Alongside the platform, the cruq.ai team designs and ships production AI systems with enterprises across sectors including business events, manufacturing and supply chain, digital advertising, HR technology, and real estate, spanning conversational agents, retrieval, forecasting, and voice.Cruq AI is best for teams, developers, and enterprises building serious, owned agents. It is not a consumer chatbot. | $100K / Non-equity Assistance / Sep 23, 2026 | ||
| TRUE-See has developed, patented and commercialized an mHealth Photo App that produces Color-Calibrated medical Images clinicians can trust. | $350K / Grant / Jun 25, 2026 | ||
| We are building the largest fitness club in the world. FitRadar is a new free app to find the best personal trainer or sport event in your local area, in any sport. Free membership. Ad-free. | $150K / Grant / Jun 15, 2026 | ||
| ImagiPortal Inc. is a pioneering "Virtual Personas Agency" and multimodal AI creation platform that has redefined the boundaries of human-AI interaction. Founded in January 2025 and launched to the public in October 2025, the company is spearheaded by Founder and CEO Roman Bulatnikov, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer NataliaBulatnikova, and Co-Founder and Chief Marketing and Investments Officer Gregg Stewart (known in the digital art community as ph0enixd0wn).At its core, ImagiPortal provides an immersive universe where users can create, talk to, and monetize living AI personas. Moving beyond traditional text-only chat, the platform enables high-fidelity interactions across text, image, audio, and video modalities. Key technological features include real-time voice and video calls with AI characters that exhibit realistic lip-syncing and facial expressions, as well as the ability to generate context-aware images and video clips within a roleplay narrative.The platform’s ecosystem is anchored by "The Arena," a public hub where creators publish their AI characters and immersive worlds. ImagiPortal distinguishes itself through a creator-first economic model, utilizing its proprietary "PORTI" credit system to distribute royalties to creators when their personas are engaged with by the community. This vision extends to a forthcoming B2B direct marketplace, where creators will be able to sell fully deployable digital characters to companies seeking virtual brand ambassadors or specialized staff.To support its intensive computational requirements, ImagiPortal is a participant in the NVIDIA Inception Program and Google for Startups, while partnering with industry leaders like Hume AI and Hedra for expressive synthesis. The platform prioritizes user freedom and privacy, offering a "private universe" experience and an NSFW-friendly environment for verified adult subscribers.Through the upcoming implementation of IP smart contracts, ImagiPortal aims to provide official intellectual property rights to creators, securing their ownership over digital assets and personas in a rapidly evolving synthetic landscape. By combining advanced multimodal technology with a robust creator economy, ImagiPortal Inc. is building a future where digital personas are persistent, evolving entities within a shared digital world. | $100K / Grant / Jun 10, 2026 | ||
| Bleenk provides tools that help users build websites through automation and AI features. The platform connects to GitHub so a user can link a project and begin creating a site. Bleenk offers components, integrations, and commands that support building, testing, and deploying web projects. The service includes a dashboard, workspace, and AI toolsthat help with code tasks and project creation. Bleenk offers plans with different levels of access, including options for individuals and groups who need shared workspaces. | $100K / Grant / May 28, 2026 | ||
| Sow & Soul is building the decision-making infrastructure for livestock and crop farming. The platform integrates real-time data capture through hardware, predictive analytics, and a Dynamic Decision Engine to enable farmers to make the right decisions at the right time. By combining software, data, and future hardware integration, Sow &Soul addresses core inefficiencies in labour, animal and crop health monitoring, and farm productivity. The company is currently working with early-stage farm partners and preparing for pilot deployments in the UK, with a long-term vision to scale across Europe and global livestock markets. | $6K / Grant / Apr 20, 2026 | ||
| ProsaBridge is an enterprise-grade AI translation engine built exclusively for the traditional publishing industry. Operating as a high-ticket B2B SaaS, ProsaBridge enables book publishers to internationalize their massive, unexploited backlists at a fraction of the cost and time of human agencies, without compromising literary quality or documentformatting.The Problem: For decades, publishers have faced a strict binary in translation: either hire expensive human translators (costing €15,000+ and taking 6-8 months per book) or rely on standard AI translation tools (like DeepL or ChatGPT). However, consumer-grade AI fails catastrophically in the publishing sector. It suffers from the "lost in the middle" phenomenon, losing narrative context after a few pages, hallucinates specific academic/theological terminology, and destroys complex Desktop Publishing (DTP) layouts like tables, footnotes, and styles in Word and InDesign.The Solution: ProsaBridge solves these enterprise bottlenecks by orchestrating state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) through a proprietary, highly resilient pipeline. Utilizing a Map-Reduce architecture, ProsaBridge analyzes entire 1,000-page manuscripts in advance to generate a globally consistent, human-approved master glossary. To guarantee 100% layout preservation, ProsaBridge operates on an industrial XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) backend. The AI never touches the raw document markup; it only translates the extracted text, ensuring that the publisher receives a perfectly formatted, print-ready .docx or .idml file in return.Key Differentiators: ProsaBridge differentiates itself through a proprietary Macro-Context Engine that guarantees absolute consistency of terminology and narrative flow across massive documents of up to 300,000 words. By seamlessly processing raw Word and InDesign files with zero-loss formatting, publishers save thousands of euros in post-translation typesetting, all while working directly within their existing workflows via a secure Microsoft Word Add-in powered by Entra ID Single Sign-On. Furthermore, the platform offers unprecedented granular editorial control, allowing editors to dynamically calibrate the AI’s translation philosophy to prioritize either a "Faithful & Precise" formal equivalence for academic works or a "Fluent & Idiomatic" dynamic equivalence for narrative prose. For the highly specialized theological publishing niche, ProsaBridge features a unique "Bring-Your-Own-Bible" API. This capability automatically detects biblical references and utilizes native tool-calling to inject exact, copyrighted translations directly from secure databases, effectively eliminating AI hallucinations in sacred texts.Compliance & Business Model: Targeting the B2B market, ProsaBridge operates on a highly profitable, prepaid word-credit model. The infrastructure is built with enterprise security at its core: hosted entirely on EU-based Microsoft Azure servers with a strict zero-data-retention policy. ProsaBridge is fully GDPR compliant and adheres to the strict transparency and copyright requirements of the EU AI Act, ensuring publishers' unreleased intellectual property is never used to train third-party models. | Non-equity Assistance / Apr 01, 2026 | ||
| PlutonAI is an innovative ecosystem that combines AI and DeFi to provide a seamless Web3 experience. | $2.7M / Seed / Feb 17, 2026 | ||
| ISEEKAIGO is a GameFi and AI company developing a shared IP universe through games, AI companions, and tools for partner studios. | $27K / Non-equity Assistance / Feb 13, 2026 | ||
| CrawlJobs is a global AI-powered job board that intelligently aggregates, curates, and matches job listings across industries and regions. Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, CrawlJobs helps job seekers find relevant opportunities faster and enables employers to reach top talent efficiently. With dedicated SEO, lead generation, andsales teams, the platform combines automation with strategic outreach to support scalable hiring solutions for businesses worldwide. | Grant / Feb 12, 2026 | ||
| See all 170 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does Microsoft for Startups invest in?
Microsoft for Startups invests primarily in Software, Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology startups, most often at Non-equity Assistance and Grant stage. Most of the 170 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
How do I contact Microsoft for Startups?
Public channels for Microsoft for Startups include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
Who are the partners at Microsoft for Startups?
The team at Microsoft for Startups includes Ayush Garg (Partner via GrocShop- BizSpark Mentee), Giuseppe Cristiano De Bernardo (Associate) and Himanshu Sharma (Founder's Hub), among 9 team members tracked by Shizune. The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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