Microsoft, SaaSBoomi to help create over 2 lakh job opportunities in India in next 5 years

Bengaluru: Microsoft on Tuesday announced to help create over 200,000 new job opportunities in the next 5 years and drive an additional $1.5 billion in venture capital funding for the Indian AI and software-as-as-service (SaaS) ecosystem.

Towards this goal, the tech giant has forged an MoU with SaaSBoomi, a leading community for B2B startups in India.

The company said during its ‘Microsoft AI Tour’ here that the strategic collaboration aims to accelerate the growth of India’s AI and SaaS ecosystem, making the country a product nation and contributing to its trillion-dollar economy.

By leveraging SaaSBoomi’s extensive network and Microsoft’s technological expertise, the partnership seeks to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in tier II cities.

“Over the next five years, Microsoft and SaaSBoomi aim to impact over 5,000 startups and over 10,000 entrepreneurs, upskill more than 150,000 startup employees through focused workshops, foster regional development in 20+ tier II cities, create over 200,000 new job opportunities, and help attract an additional US $1.5 billion in venture capital funding for the Indian AI and SaaS ecosystem,” said the tech giant.

As part of the collaboration, Microsoft will also support the emergence of more than 50 unicorns and soonicorns; driving advancements in innovation, sustainability, and technological infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Research (MSR) Lab also announced an AI Innovation Network to deepen its commitment to cultivate the AI ecosystem in the country.

Under the AI Innovation Network, MSR will build new collaborations, especially with digital natives, to accelerate the transition from research to real, usable business solutions.

MSR India has already initiated a collaboration with Physics Wallah on math reasoning and is in ongoing discussions with other Digital Natives on topics such as causal inference, optimizing Indic LLMs, prompt optimization, and reinforcement learning.

MSR India has had a long history of both incubating startups and open sourcing research technologies that have then been picked up by startups.

The company said it is deeply invested in advancing the sustainability of AI and is addressing the resources needed to support responsible growth of AI infrastructure.

IANS