SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA — JANUARY 22, 2019 — Food traceability venture Transparent Path announced its acceptance into the Microsoft for Startups accelerator program today.

Microsoft for Startups is a unique program accelerating growth-stage startups (Seed and Series A) who work with enterprise customers. This program provides dedicated resources to prepare startup marketing and sales teams to effectively sell with Microsoft’s global sales organization and partner ecosystem. Membership includes access to Microsoft technologies, go-to-market expertise, and community benefits.

Yorke Rhodes, co-founder of Blockchain @ Microsoft.

Microsoft announced the program in February 2018. The company is committing $500M over the next two years to offer joint sales engagements with startups, along with access to Microsoft technology, and new community spaces that promote collaboration across local and global ecosystems. Yorke Rhodes, Program Manager on the Microsoft Blockchain Engineering team, nominated Transparent Path for the program.

Participation means access to a massive potential sales force

“This program is a great way for startups to leverage MSFT customers and channel partners,” said Eric Weaver, Transparent Path CEO and co-founder. “With over 40,000 sales representatives and hundreds of thousands of partners, this opportunity gives us access to a huge sales force. It helps us, and it helps Microsoft add our unique offer to its customer base.”

The program also provides Transparent Path with up to $120,000 in free Azure credits, enterprise grade technical support and development tools. It also provides productivity and business applications like Office 365 Business Premium, Visual Studio Enterprise Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365. 

“One of the most difficult aspects of any startup is scaling,” said Weaver. “By leveraging this relationship, our offer can reach a far wider audience through the stellar Azure sales team that already has reach into our market of $500M-$5B food companies. We’re thrilled about this opportunity and what it could it for our business.”

ABOUT TRANSPARENT PATH

Transparent Path is a food traceability company, showing where your food comes from, how it got to you, and what happened to it along the way. Transparent Path reduces risk for producers, retailers, supply chain partners and consumers using an innovative combination of IoT sensors, on-package memory and blockchain-based logistics data. The company is a division of Transparent Holdings, a West Coast incubator focused on the food, beauty, pharma and cannabis sectors.