Microsoft Ventures, the corporate venturing subsidiary of software producer Microsoft, rebranded to M12 on Monday in a bid to set itself further apart from its parent’s accelerator initiative.
The new name comes two years after Microsoft restructured Microsoft Ventures from a global network of accelerators into a full-fledged corporate venture capital unit.
The two different iterations of Microsoft Ventures proved too confusing, both to portfolio companies from the original and new unit and internally among M12 staff, Nagraj Kashyap, head of M12, told Business Insider.
The accelerator is now known as Microsoft ScaleUp and is part of Microsoft for Startups, an initative established in February 2018 that also includes cloud services credit programs BizSpark and BizSpark Plus.
M12, which has already backed more than 50 startups over the past two years, also added another four companies to its portfolio yesterday by investing a total of $3.5m in the winners of its startup competition, Innovate.AI. The winners also received credits for cloud platform Microsoft Azure.
The startups include US-based Envisagenics, which has developed a cloud-based drug discovery platform that exploits RNA data from patients and uses artificial intelligence to identify new drug targets.
Envisagenics previously closed a $2.4m seed round in November 2017 that featured Third Kind Venture Capital, Cosine, Dolby Family Ventures, Dynamk Capital, NY Empire State Development and SV Angel.
Hazy, a UK-based data anonymisation developer spun out from University College London (UCL), received $1m and will use the money to boost its machine learning software as it prepares for increased demand ahead of new European Union data protection laws.
The spinout, formerly known as Anon AI, raised approximately $460,000 in a January 2018 pre-seed round backed by the publicly-owned London Co-Investment Fund, AI Seed, Ascension Ventures and UCL Technology Fund, the university venture fund of UCL.
The recipients also included ZenCity, an Israel-based company that relies on artificial intelligence to analyse data extracted from communications on social media, hotlines and other channels to offer real-time insights to city officials on how to improve services.
Finally, Israel-based speech recognition technology developer Voiceitt secured $500,000 from M12 in the form of the AI for Good prize. It focuses on speech recognition for people suffering from conditions that impact their ability to communicate.