Satya Nadella enthused about India's entrepreneurial spirit

India is probably one of the places in the world where the entrepreneurial energy is able to scale up, not just start, Microsoft's India-born chief Satya Nadella said on Monday.

He said the entrepreneurial energy in the country is "tremendous" and Microsoft is "enthused" about it. "Every time I come back to India, the thing that grabs you is the entrepreneurial spirit of the place. There are a whole bunch of startups doing really exciting work," Nadella said.

Center of entrepreneurial energy at least for us right now in India is all around our cloud. It is fantastic, the quality of the entrepreneurs, the ideas... the Indian market itself is huge, but also going beyond that, it is amazing to see (the growth)", he said in response to Nilekani's question regarding entrepreneurial energy in India.

Nadella kick-started his three-day visit to India here, where he participated in a discussion organised by Microsoft on cloud-first, mobile-first world along with Indian IT veteran Nandan Nilekani.

Stating that India has some brands that have already well established, Nadella said there was a stunning cross-section of startups in the country.

He said building on India Stack, the transaction analytics, the very idea of a presence where a payments infrastructure getting built on top of Aadhaar by using the cloud, the diagnostic applications that are getting built, world class AI. It was very fascinating to come here and learn about. "I think that the entrepreneurial energy of the place is just tremendous," he said.

Pointing out that in the last twelve months there were about 2000 startups in the Microsoft Accelerator programme that the company runs out of Bengaluru, Nadella said 2000 startups using our cloud, it is fantastic.

The funding they are getting locally as well as foreign capital and the number of people joining the Microsoft Accelerator, we are very very enthused.