Microsoft woos Y Combinator startups with big Azure credits

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Microsoft wants to boost its cloud’s profile among startups so it’s making $500,000 in Azure credits available to Y Combinator-backed companies.

The credits start rolling with the Winter 2015 class and will continue after that, according to this Y Combinator blog post. This can be a good number of companies — there were 106 companies in the Spring and Winter 2014 classes, for example.

Cloud credits are ubiquitous — Y Combinator has special hosting offers from Amazon, Google, Rackspace and now Microsoft, according to Y Combinator president Sam Altman. But, $500K is a big number. (Oh, and the startups will also get three years of Office 365 subscription, “access to Microsoft developer staff,” plus a year of CloudFlare and DataStax services.

Qualified startups can typically get $1,000 to $15,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits, and there are other freebies available. Then, in September, things started going a bit haywire. Google started offering $100,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits to qualified startups. Two months later IBM upped the ante to  $120,000 in credit for SoftLayer infrastructure or BlueMix PaaS. Again all for “qualified” startups.

This is a strategic gambit for Microsoft, which wants to get more young companies — many of which are probably not Windows focused — to check out Azure. It’s also a way to chip away at Amazon Web Services’ prodigious lead among startups. AWS is pretty much the default cloud selection for young companies.

This story was updated at 5:24 a.m. PST February 11 to reflect that AWS typically provides qualified startups with up to $15K in promotional funding.

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