Funding the Future of Collaboration

The Cisco Spark Innovation Fund is a $150 million initiative to enable exceptional startups, developers, and ISVs to create new solutions to improve the Cisco Spark experience. We distribute funding in a variety of ways, including:

Direct investments

Partnerships with startup accelerators

Micro-grants to accelerate adoption of products that integrate with Cisco Spark

Funding events and activities where we showcase products within the Cisco Spark ecosystem

Many of our 100+ investments to date are with startups and independent software developers that believe in the power of collaboration. These investments aren’t your average communications solutions. A few examples:

Transforming student to teacher interaction with Involvio to solve the problem of student retention and bolster engagement.

Improving customer experiences using ingenious integrations with Altocloud

Providing unique customer insights using brilliant bots including LocalMeasure.

Find these and hundreds more in the Cisco Spark Depot, the hub for all Cisco Spark integrations and bots.

More than Dollars

There’s more to the Fund than money. We’re working to more closely to combine Cisco Spark with best-in-class tools from other vendors. Whether it’s technical and business mentoring, co-marketing with startups, or connecting our developers with customers, the Innovation Fund provides companies with help building their businesses.

In some cases, we’re bundling some of these products with Cisco Spark and reselling them through Cisco. Our sales team is already selling products from four of our portfolio companies — and four more will be on our resale list by the end of this year. This level of cooperation enhances the overall effectiveness of Cisco Spark while helping boost awareness of our pioneering partners.

Connecting with Developers

Part of transforming the way we work together means working more closely with the developer community. We’re meeting people in person, attending leading industry events and hackathons, including TechCrunch Disrupt, SX SW, and TADHack. This gives developers easy hands-on access to our products (such as Cisco Spark Board), and lets them experiment with the powerful Cisco Spark APIs. By bringing products from throughout our developer ecosystem to these events, we’re helping developers reach markets they might not otherwise be able to access.

Whether you are a one-person shop, a small start-up, or a large company, our goal is to provide the support and dev tools you need to add collaboration capabilities to your services. By teaming up with developers like you, we’re creating new ways to work smarter together.

Want to get involved? Contact us to apply to be part of the Cisco Spark Innovation Fund.