M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund

At our recent Accelerate Together event in Mountain View, founders, investors, and technology leaders came together to explore the next wave of AI innovation with partners including Cognition, Replit, LlamaIndex, and Icertis. Through Microsoft for Startups and M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, Microsoft is helping early-stage founders scale faster and tackle real-world challenges with AI, serving as a trusted bridge between high-potential startups and global enterprise customers. This is how we accelerate innovation together. 💡🤝 Read more: https://lnkd.in/esP2VkZt

🎉 We're proud to announce that PAXAFE has earned the Microsoft Healthcare AI Certified Software designation. This certification validates our technology against rigorous standards for ethical AI, data privacy, and responsible innovation in healthcare. As a Microsoft partner built on Azure and backed by M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, this certification reinforces our commitment to delivering secure, trusted and sound AI to the cold chain cargo owners & logistics services providers we serve. Ilya Preston, Ashok Seetharam, Brian Shultz, Chandler Williams, Ivan Castro, Sally Ann Frank #decisionintelligence #ai #llm #coldchain #digitaltransformation

🎉 We're proud to announce that RAAPID INC has earned the Microsoft Healthcare AI Certified Software designation. This certification validates our technology against rigorous standards for ethical AI, data privacy, and responsible innovation in healthcare. As a Microsoft partner built on Azure and backed by M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, this certification reinforces our commitment to delivering secure, trusted, and clinically sound AI to the payers and providers we serve. 👉 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 - https://bit.ly/42wAzw5 . . . Chetan Parikh | Michael Clark | Derek Haynes | Sally Ann Frank

At M12, we back founders who reimagine what’s possible — and micro1 is doing just that. The company is flipping the script on AI and education by recruiting professors and domain experts to teach machines, not the other way around. As featured in Forbes, micro1 is redefining how intelligence is built, blending human expertise with scalable AI systems. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/eVMZyjXW https://lnkd.in/eCBkKv9H

🚀 #SFTechWeek is almost here — and the future of AI will be front and center. On October 9th, M12 Managing Partner Todd Graham will join a panel of leaders shaping how human intelligence fuels AI training and innovation: 🌟 Ali Ansari, Founder of micro1 (an M12 portfolio company) 🌟 Arjun Desai, Co-founder of Cartesia 🌟 Rob McGrorty, Product Lead at Amazon AGI Labs The conversation will be moderated by Jules Qiu, Investor at Radical Ventures. Together, this group will explore how expert data, human-centered design, and ethical guardrails are shaping the next generation of applications — from frontier LLMs to enterprise agents and voice AI. If you’re building, investing, or scaling in AI, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss. 🔗 Register here to join us: https://lnkd.in/gnnDrfg4

Spend is one of the clearest signals of where startups are headed. This new analysis from Andreessen Horowitz and Mercury maps the 50 AI-native apps capturing real dollars from early-stage companies. A few signals resonate with what we’re seeing across our portfolio: ➡️  Founders directing dollars toward capital-efficient AI adoption ➡️ Consumer-born apps rapidly entering enterprise workflows ➡️ Vertical AI gaining traction in recruiting, compliance, and customer service We’re glad to see our portfolio companies micro1 and Solve Intelligence recognized on the list, both building the AI-native foundations of tomorrow’s enterprise. The takeaway is clear: AI-native software is moving from experiment to enterprise standard faster than any prior wave of technology.

At M12, we believe the best innovation happens when startups and enterprises meet at the same table.     This week, we brought together leaders from one of our largest enterprise customers with founders from our portfolio: Relyance AI (Nitin Nagpal), Growthspace (Omer Glass), WorkBoard (Deidre Paknad), and Databook (Anand Shah). The showcase took place at the new Microsoft Experience Center One in Redmond.     A big thank you to Marty Collins, our Head of Portfolio Development, for opening the session and highlighting how M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund invests in and scales the startup ecosystem.     We look forward to hosting more of these gatherings, connecting enterprise leaders with startups that are shaping the future of AI, SaaS, and beyond.

Welcome, Cheryl Cheng — our newest Managing Partner at M12! For Cheryl, early-stage investing starts and ends with founders. She seeks visionary teams who can balance the tensions every startup faces: growth vs. discipline, competitiveness vs. culture, and ambition vs. endurance. She’s especially energized by what’s ahead in AI. From healthcare and energy to supply chain and beyond, Cheryl sees massive opportunities to solve problems that once felt out of reach. So why join M12? It’s our position at the heart of the enterprise ecosystem — backing seed through Series B founders and helping them scale with Microsoft’s resources, channels, and technology. 📖 Dive into our Q&A with Cheryl for her take on founders, leadership, and the next wave of AI.

Stablecoins are quickly becoming the internet’s payment rails — and verifiable data is the key to unlocking enterprise adoption. Our portfolio company Space and Time is bridging those two worlds through a new partnership with Circle Ventures, integrating USDC directly into its blockchain data platform. This move makes it easier for enterprises and developers to combine trusted data with digital assets and build scalable onchain applications. At M12, we’re excited to support the Space and Time team as they continue to deliver the infrastructure powering the next wave of Web3 innovation. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ezFikYnG?