Microsoft Donates Azure Credits to Y Combinator Companies
In a shrewd attempt to get the next runaway success Silicon Valley startup onto the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft is giving away bucketloads of Azure credits to Y Combinator's current class.
Positioning the move as part of Microsoft's long commitment to startups, Microsoft Chief Evangelist Steve Guggenheimer blogged this week, "In this pursuit, Microsoft will provide Y Combinator's current class access to Microsoft Azure and a broad suite of Microsoft technology, as well as support. This will include $500,000 in Microsoft Azure credit, three years of Office 365, as well as direct access to Microsoft's engineering teams -- for Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch of startups."
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, separately blogged, "This is a big deal for many startups -- it's common for hosting to be the second largest expense after salaries."
Altman said Microsoft's donations also include a year of free enterprise services from CloudFlare and DataStax.
"This brings the total value of special offers extended to each YC company to well over $1,000,000," Altman wrote. "The relentless nagging from partners to grow faster we throw in for free."
Among the 700 startups funded by Y Combinator since 2005 are reddit, Dropbox, Docker, Airbnb, Coinbase and Codeacademy.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 10, 2015 at 1:40 PM