Q&A with Vastari
Microsoft has announced the 10 early stage start-ups it wants to nurture through its London-based accelerator programme next year.
The start-ups include everyone from Vastari, an online platform for connecting museum curators with private collectors for exhibition loans, to Barpass, a mobile ordering platform that lets consumers order and pay for their food, drink or merchandise, automatically. Others include Buying Butler, Caribu, Cognisess, Dataloop.io, Gateway Interactive, SKARA, Stat.io, UXcam, Vivid and Von Bismark.
Microsoft’s accelerator will compete with a number of existing London-based bootcamps, such as Techstars, Seedcamp, Level 39 and Oxygen, which recently relocated from Birmingham to London.
Q&A with Vastari
How many users do you have?
We have already registered hundreds of museums and collectors from six continents around the world. This includes three of the top 10 most visited museums worldwide and dozens of collectors who have uploaded more than ten works.
In just under a year since our beta launch, we have enabled five international connections for exhibitions planned for 2015-2020.
How much funding have you received so far?
We raised a first round of £90,000 that has fuelled our work in the last two years. We are about to close a second round of funding in January 2014.
How many employees do you have?
We have a team of six. We have three client development managers, two developers and one founder/managing director.
What do you hope to gain by being part of Micorosft's accelerator?
We are planning to launch the subscription service in 2014 and will be using the accelerator as a way to do this in the best way we can, to grow our business but also keep all of our customers happy.
Find the article here