Microsoft is providing a helping hand to a group of data science and machine learning startups.
Since past several months, the company was on a cross-country tour across 12 cities in the United States and Canada. On Thursday, the tech giant announced that it has selected 10 startups out of total 720 applicants, who will be a part of the four-month accelerator in Seattle.
Tech accelerators are intended to help new companies by providing guidance, networking, and funding. The director of Microsoft’s Seattle accelerator, Hanan Lavy said that “Each member of the current class of companies specializes in one or the other component of machine learning. They also have enough knowledge of computer science behind algorithms that allow software to identify patterns and respond accordingly. These machine learning startups range from a university recruiting tool to an artificial intelligence doctor bot. It is popping in all sorts of industries, from financial applications to DNA sequencing.”
Each company in the accelerator will receive help from the tech giant for next four months. They will have company’s engineers and experts working with them as well as access to various platforms like Azure cloud services. Additionally, they will also receive a $25,000 grant.
All the 10 startups that are part of Seattle accelerator are mentioned below:
Microsoft has selected machine learning startups for accelerator
- Affinio
 It gives an understanding of social silent majority to the brands and agencies through actionable audience insights.
- Agolo
It builds proprietary summarization technology for analysts, which improves the accuracy of reporting by 4 folds.
- Clarify
It provides a simple API that helps developers to understand and search audios and videos.
- DefinedCrowd
This platform provides big data for speech and NLP technology by merging machine learning and crowd sourcing.
- Knomos
It is a knowledge network that leverages data visualization for education, legal research, and user collaboration.
- MedWhat
It is a doctor that uses artificial intelligence and answers several medical questions. It can also have personalized conversation with the user about their health, provides medical reminders and maintains a user’s health record.
- OneBridge Solutions
This startup provides enterprise, mission-critical cloud apps for pipeline companies with the use of MS Azure, machine learning, and big data.
- Percolata
It optimizes retail labor via sensors and mobile/web applications.
- Plexuss
It provides options to universities for finding and recruiting students.
- simMachines
It offers metric and non-metric nearest neighbor classifiers, clustering, recommendations and search with a new family of dense distance functions.
It makes business sense for the tech giant to provide help to these startups because they get a better idea of emerging trends among entrepreneurs, as stated by Lavy.
The main advantage of using Microsoft’s platform is that it doesn’t take an equity stake in the company at the end of the program.
