Pitney Bowes, a global technology company that provides innovative products and solutions to power commerce, has named six startups to the summer session of the Pitney Bowes Accelerator Program.
The company also announced 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 global Pitney Bowes Innovation team leads the programs. They recently trained 1,100 engineers and software developers in technology areas such as mobile, SaaS, AI, analytics and IoT. The new Pitney Bowes brand is at the center of the company’s Design System which integrates Design Thinking, Globalization and Talent Acquisition. In April 2016, the Company launched the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, a commerce enabler providing access for clients and developers to Pitney Bowes solutions, analytics and application programming interfaces (API’s) across the full commerce continuum.
The Pitney Bowes Accelerator Program provides mentorship, access to venture funds and networking to innovative startups in the areas of customer information management, mobile, data analytics, location-based services, ecommerce management and machine learning.
The Accelerator startups will have access to select Pitney Bowes software and APIs for six months. In addition, Pitney Bowes will provide mentorship with leading engineering and innovation experts for technical and business guidance. The startups will be placed in Pune or Noida for incubation and will have opportunities to network with prospective investors.
The six startups named to the 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
“One of the greatest drivers of innovation is collaboration,” said Roger Pilc, Chief Innovation Officer of Pitney Bowes. “The Accelerator Program brings our people together with startups and emerging technology companies to develop APIs on our Commerce Cloud platform, network with peer startups and our global teams, and collaborate together on emerging technologies.”
“These six startups are developing technologies for the physical and digital worlds of commerce,” said Manish Choudhary, Senior Vice President, Global Innovation and Managing Director, Pitney Bowes India. “We’re especially pleased to host two women-led startups in the Accelerator Program, because diversity is also a great driver of innovation.”
Last year, Pitney Bowes incubated four startups as a part of the program: Ipsator, Fetchon, Kayeura, and Shipdesk, and two to an Accelerator Collaboration Program: Loginext and Primaseller.
Ranga Jagannath, Co-founder of Fetchon, said, “Through the Pitney Bowes Accelerator Program, we were exposed to technologies and products that reinforced our belief in the prospects for proximity driven experiences for brands and consumers.”
The Pitney Bowes Accelerator Program has entered into a partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft will provide subscriptions to Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Azure Cloud Credits up to $27,000 over three years via the BizSpark program.
