9 startups graduate as a part of the MS Accelerator Batch 2: Maturity of startups the key difference

The India Microsoft Accelerator today graduated 9 startups as a part of the 2nd batch of the program. 12 startups entered the accelerator and 9 have been graduated at this point in time. The first batch saw 11 startups graduate. The demo day was held with a lot of fan fare with entrepreneurs, investors, media folks and people from the ecosystem. Here is the list of companies that graduated:

explara: Online event ticketing and registering platform

deck: Lets anyone create awesome presentations on any device

Harness: EdTech startup disrutping classroom learning

i7 Networks: Agentless BYOD Discovery and Control

iDOS: Enables business users to process financial transactions accurately and in compliance with rules.

SupportBee: Easy way to manage customer support emails

TableGrabber: Real-time online restaurant reservation system with dynamic pricing.

Tuebora: Helps organizations govern access to their applications and data, both on-premise and on-cloud.

Visarity: 3D mobile ads

Difference:

Accelerators usually are known to take in very early stage startups and so was the case with Microsoft Accelerator's first batch. But a stark difference this time around was the maturity of the startups. All the startups had a founding team which came with a lot of prior experience and most of them have done startups before (e.g. iDOS, i7Networks, SupportBee, etc). The startups also have been around for a while and won previous accolades in some cases.

This might not be very pleasant news for the first time early stage startups but will help in improving success rates of the accelerator companies. The stage at which startups are entering accelerators has also been on the later side for this batch of the startups. For instance, companies like Explara (2009), SupportBee (2010), Harness (2011), etc., have been around for more than 3 years.

Exits for startups in India has been hard and for accelerators to thrive more success stories are necessary (read more on the business of accelerators). Accelerators are surely a very necessary part of the startup support system but it'll be interesting to see how their role shapes up going forward.

The Microsoft Accelerator put up a grand show and more about them on their website.