The latest cohort at the Microsoft Ventures accelerator in Seattle is dedicated to innovating in the business enterprise space, and, after a competitive application process, a Detroit startup has been selected to participate—a first for Motor City entrepreneurs.
Slope is a new software offering from the TernPro team, and Brian Bosche said it’s meant to make it easy for creative and marketing teams to manage projects. It was born out of the lessons Bosche and his co-founders learned at TernPro, a startup devoted to helping businesses create and manage video content.
“We worked with 60 clients, and it was a nightmare to do revisions, collaborate, or share notes,” Bosche said. “It was a really difficult process with a lot of moving parts. We wanted to create a single platform to make it easier.”
Bosche said Slope allows artists, designers, and producers, for instance, to collaborate on any visual asset. TernPro will make money by charging its customers a monthly subscription fee based on cloud storage needed and the number of employees in the company.
Bosche said that Slope is now being beta-tested with 350 companies, and part of what the company hopes to accomplish during its four-month tenure with Microsoft Ventures is to make the Slope software accessible for every company—even a scrappy , bootstrapped startup. Another major goal while in Seattle: Hire top programming talent and bring them back to Detroit.
TernPro has seven people on the team these days, and Bosche said the company is currently working on closing a seed round. One the company has a bug-free product, it will begin new fundraising “to grow,” Bosche said.
Bosche said that company executives are honored to be selected for a spot in the prestigiousMicrosoft Ventures program, which is hosting its second class of startups. More than 500 companies applied and were eventually narrowed to a final round of 40, whose executives then pitched their ideas to a group of Microsoft Ventures executives and other experts. Each selected startup receives a onetime gift of $25,000 from Microsoft—no equity exchange needed—which is a departure from most accelerators.
“We see this as a big opportunity,” Bosche added. “We’re the only Detroit company accepted into Microsoft Ventures. I love seeing Detroit companies getting into programs like this one, or Y Combinator, or TechStars. It shows we’re making a lot of progress when it comes to tech startups.”
