Pitney Bowes names 6 startups for its 6-month accelerator programme
Global technology firm Pitney Bowes has named six startups for its summer session of its accelerator programme, Scale-Up. The programme aims to give young and emerging startups an opportunity to expand, as well as use Pitney Bowes cloud services and APIs.
Scale-up broadly provides mentorship, access to venture funds and networking to innovative startups in the areas of customer information management, mobile, data analytics, location-based services, e-commerce management and machine learning.
The global Pitney Bowes innovation team recently trained 1,100 engineers and software developers in technology areas such as mobile, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and Internet of Things (IoT). The new Pitney Bowes brand is at the centre of the company’s design system, which integrates design thinking, globalisation and talent acquisition.
The accelerator startups will have access to Pitney Bowes software and APIs for six months. In addition, Pitney Bowes will provide mentorship with leading engineering and innovation experts for technical and business guidance. The startups will be placed in Pune or Noida for incubation and will have opportunities to network with prospective investors.
The six startups selected for the program are eCourierz, an online automated shipping tool, Infinite Analytics, a big data and social analytics company for a 360-degree-view of the customer, Medimojo, a digital health platform for simplifying healthcare, Niki, an AI-powered bot that simplifies the ordering experience, Sponsifyme - a real-time geo-location-based marketing platform for offline businesses and Wedosky, a drone-based startup with a mapping and analytics platform.
“These six startups are developing technologies for the physical and digital worlds of commerce. We’re especially pleased to host two women-led startups in the accelerator programme, because diversity is also a great driver of innovation,” said Manish Choudhary, Senior Vice President, Global Innovation and Managing Director, Pitney Bowes India.
The Pitney Bowes Accelerator Program has also partnered with Microsoft, which will provide subscriptions to Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Azure Cloud Credits up to $27,000 over three years via the BizSpark programme.
In April 2016, the company launched the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, a commerce enabler providing access for clients and developers to Pitney Bowes solutions, analytics and application programming interfaces (APIs) across the full commerce continuum.
Last year, Pitney Bowes incubated four startups as a part of the programme, which included Ipsator, Fetchon, Kayeura, and Shipdesk, and two to an accelerator collaboration programme: Loginext and Primaseller.