City startups win praise from Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off his three-day visit to India by interacting with startups here on Monday.

He said Indian entrepreneurs were in a position to achieve ‘great things’ by solving the country’s unique problems with the power of technology.

Participating in a Microsoft event to promote ‘a cloud-first, mobile-first world,’ he said, “Every time I come back to India, the thing that grabs you is the entrepreneurial spirit of the place. There are a whole bunch of startups doing really exciting work.”

An alumnus of Manipal Institute of Technology, Nadella said, “The centre of entrepreneurial energy at least for us right now in India is all around our cloud. It is fantastic, the quality of the entrepreneurs, the ideas...” In the last 12 months, about 2,000 startups have participated in the Microsoft Accelerator programme in Bengaluru, he said.

Appreciates IndiaStack

He also appreciated the government and Nandan Nilekani, who also participated in the interaction, for taking the initiative to build IndiaStack, the transaction analytics platform based on Aadhaar.

IndiaStack helps governments, businesses, startups and developers to create paperless, cashless solutions.

“It is pretty tremendous, how it got started. But now with the speed at which you are able to scale it, it is comparable to any other Internet-scale ramp up,” Nadella said.