Things Startups Need to Know About Pitney Bowes' Accelerator Program The program is aligned with NASSCOM's 10,000 Startups initiative.
By Sneha Banerjee •
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Global technology firm Pitney Bowes' summer batch has six new startups. Under Pitney Bowes' Accelerator Program, the company has introduced a new six-month program called "Scale-Up", designed to give young and emerging startups an opportunity to expand using Pitney Bowes cloud services and APIs.
The program is aligned with NASSCOM's 10,000 Startups initiative.
In an interview with Entrepreneur India Manish Choudhary, Senior Vice President and Managing Director – Pitney Bowes elaborated on how the company goes about selecting startups for this program.
Here's what startups need to know about the program
"The accelerator program focuses on 2-3 key growth areas, which are significant for Pitney Bowes and operates in the digital commerce space. For instance; location intelligence – which includes usage of location, maps and demographic data to understand user behaviour. With this programme, it assists start-ups by providing technology, right capabilities, software, mentorship and architecture software," he said.
Startups in the program get access to Pitney Bowes' software, application programming interfaces (APIs) and data for the duration of the program. Training, technical and business guidance and mentoring is also provided to the startups from Pitney Bowes engineering and innovation leaders, and from software industry experts.
In addition to these strategic connections, startups in the Pitney Bowes Accelerator program will also be networking with prospective investors. Overall, the Pitney Bowes Accelerator gives the startups credibility when they go to a client.
The huge potential in "big data'
Manish also stressed on the tremendous opportunity through big data, where any business can capture and analyze huge amounts of data in a manner that was never available to them before.
He further added, "IT companies are evolving and developing technologies to create and leverage optimized big data. It also requires right infrastructure that can provide scale & performance for future technologies, thus, ushering higher levels of investment and business agility. Much of the investor interest stems from massive enterprise demand for big data tools."
The six startups named to Pitney Bowes' Accelerator 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 Artificial Intelligence-powered bot that simplifies the ordering experience
- Sponsifyme - a real-time geolocation-based marketing platform for offline businesses
- Wedosky - a drone-based startup with a mapping and analytics platform
There have been number of global companies that have floated their accelerator programs in India. Oracle, Microsoft, Airbus and other companies have enrolled a number of startups on to their program, thereby nurturing them and providing them necessary resources to scale up.
