APAC PE/VC Partnerships Vertical at Microsoft
Problem
How do you build a $130M business selling cloud infrastructure to private equity and venture capital firms across 15 Asia-Pacific markets with no precedent or playbook?
Approach
Built partnerships vertical from zero by identifying PE/VC portfolio companies as high-velocity cloud adopters, then scaling across geographies with localized GTM and institutional relationship management.
Impact
Scaled vertical to $130M across APAC. Created partnership templates now used across Microsoft's global PE/VC program.
This was a market creation exercise. The premise: private equity and venture capital firms could serve as distribution channels for cloud adoption across their portfolio companies—but no such program existed in APAC.
The work involved building the vertical from scratch: validating the business model with pilot partners, designing deal structures that worked across diverse regulatory environments, creating sales and account management processes for institutional relationships, and scaling execution across 15 markets with varying levels of cloud maturity.
Success required navigating both the enterprise sales complexity of cloud infrastructure and the relationship-driven dynamics of institutional partnerships—plus the operational challenge of coordinating across Microsoft’s country organizations, each with different priorities and resources.
The result was a vertical that scaled to $130M and created templates for partnership development that Microsoft has since deployed globally.