Microsoft for Startups

Our team is heading to Panathēnea 2026 and we'd love to meet you there. Nine speakers. One booth. The EMEA startup ecosystem all in one place. 👇

If you're heading to New York TECH WEEK by a16z, we have six events lined up with something for every stage of the founder journey. 📍 New York, New York ➡️ Founder Exchange: Early Builders in the AI Era Monday, June 1 | 7:00pm–10:00pm EDT 🔗 https://msft.it/6041vnDFR ➡️ The AI Founder Playbook: Breakfast & Panel @ Microsoft Tuesday, June 2 | 8:30am–12:00pm EDT 🔗 https://msft.it/6042vnDFr ➡️ Everywhere Ventures Pre-Seed Founders Breakfast Tuesday, June 2 | 9:00am–11:00am EDT 🔗 https://msft.it/6043vnDFT? ➡️ Founders x Funders Breakfast with Serena Ventures, LinkedIn, and Microsoft for Startups Wednesday, June 3 | 9:00am–12:00pm EDT 🔗 https://msft.it/6044vnDFp ➡️ VC Reverse Pitch with Founders & Funders and Microsoft for Startups Thursday, June 4 | 10:00am–1:00pm EDT 🔗 https://msft.it/6045vnDFV? ➡️ From Idea to Live MVP in 6 Hours with GitHub Copilot Thursday, June 4 | 9:30am–4:30pm EDT 🔗 https://msft.it/6046vnDFn #NYTechWeek Miguel Martinez Ayo Haruna Meital Shamia Amit Svarzenberg

This is the moment student founders have been working toward. On June 2, the Imagine Cup World Championship winner will be revealed live at Microsoft Build. Three teams, CopyFlag, Revora Health, and SpoilSafe (AL26), built AI-powered startups to solve real problems. We can't wait to see who takes it home.

We're spotlighting the startups joining us at Microsoft Build 2026, and this cohort covers a lot of ground: generative AI-powered site reliability, cloud-native robotics, multimodal vector databases, large-scale code modernization, and more. What they share is a bias toward solving real enterprise problems, and all of them are building on Azure and available on Microsoft Marketplace. Read the full startup spotlight on the Microsoft for Startups blog, and register for Build while you're at it. 🔗 https://msft.it/6047vVpMN

Cloud operations don't break because teams lack data. They break because no one can make sense of it fast enough. NeuBird AI is changing that. Built on Microsoft Azure and Foundry, their Production Ops Platform uses agentic AI to investigate incidents in real time, correlating signals across logs, metrics, and recent changes to surface root cause with high confidence. One enterprise banking customer cut incident investigation time by 60%. That's the difference between chasing alerts and actually resolving them. Read how NeuBird AI is helping engineering teams move faster and operate smarter: https://msft.it/6049vpWDH

Founder Friday is back! Your AI agent aced the demo. But can it survive real users? 📉 This month, Heena Purohit, Director of AI Startups at Microsoft for Startups, is joined by Alexander Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI, to talk about what it really takes to ship AI agents that work in the wild. We'll dig into why pilots fail, what a rigorous evaluation loop looks like, and how Snorkel AI helped a global bank go from 25% to 95% expert acceptance on a mission-critical legal contract agent. Honest insights on enterprise AI that go beyond the hype. Don't miss it. Register below.

Not all the good stuff at Microsoft Build happens on the main stage. Join Microsoft for Startups on June 2 for Dev Your Own Way, an after-hours reception in San Francisco. Expect hands-on activations with GitHub, Fireworks AI, and NVIDIA for Startups alongside direct access to Microsoft technical experts and startup founders who are actively shipping. Plus, custom AI swag you make yourself, food trucks, and a DJ. Come ready to build, leave with new workflows and new connections. Register now: https://msft.it/6048vTTd0 M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund

#MicrosoftBuild is coming to San Francisco June 2–3, 2026. Building with AI and moving fast? Learn how to train and fine-tune models on a startup budget, architect agents that actually ship, orchestrate multi-model workflows without the enterprise overhead, and launch AI features that scale as you grow. Register and learn more 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eKgQTn4q

The next era of biotech won't be defined by a single breakthrough. It'll be defined by the systems that take biological insight all the way to scalable impact. That shift changes what "platform" means for biotech founders. It's not a procurement decision. It's a strategy that shapes how fast you iterate, how confidently you collaborate, and how credible you are to pharma partners and regulators. Sally Ann Frank and Melanie Janczyk break down the trends shaping what AI-native biotech actually looks like in practice, from agentic workflows and confidential compute to why compliance readiness is becoming a speed advantage. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/ePyewAXM #Biotech #LifeSciences #AIinHealthcare #HealthTech

We're moving from AI possibility to AI accountability. Founders and investors across our ecosystem keep landing on the same five signals for what separates promising demos from enterprise-ready AI. Ran Wei Baker brings together Surojit Chatterjee Founder and CEO of Ema, Sravan Kumar Rekandar Co-founder and CTO of Drishya AI Labs, and Cheryl Cheng, Managing Partner M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund to unpack what it actually takes to build AI real enterprises can rely on. Read the full breakdown here 🔗 https://msft.it/6043vucXW