– The Wall Street Journal –
Microsoft MSFT +1.57% this month is introducing the newest graduates of its Israeli Windows Azure accelerator to the U.S. as the startups embark on a U.S. tour seeking prospective investors and customers. Microsoft started the accelerator last year as part of a broad corporate effort to re-ignite interest in its software, which includes the Azure cloud platform. Startups don’t have to use Azure to get accepted.
Israel lately has been a startup machine, with Israeli army veterans using the technical skills they’ve learned in the military to launch companies alongside their friends, and admission to the accelerator is getting more competitive–the company reports 300 applicants for 13 places this time, compared to 100 applicants for 11 places last year.
These newest startups are also raising money faster than the startups in the previous class, according to accelerator Director Hanan Levy, and several founders turned down the offer of a pre-seed convertible note from Microsoft’s investor partners because they got better offers from bigger, outside investors.
“We filtered more than 95% of the companies–these are the cream of the cream. All the investors need to do are choose which ones,” Levy said.
Three companies visiting Microsoft offices in San Francisco this week had already raised money, and some said they expect to go for a Series A round soon.
W.S.C. Sports Technologies, which has raised $1 million so far from investors including Plus Ventures, lets users create and share highly personalized video clips of sporting events. Viewers can filter videos by action, team, player, game and so on, adding music and their own commentaries if they choose. WSC can also automatically match video to text to appeal to publishers. The company is in conversations with U.S. broadcasters about using WSC’s service to monetize content, according to co-founders Daniel Schichman and Aviv Arnon…