M12 is Microsoft's venture fund, launched in 2016 as Microsoft Ventures and rebranded to M12 in 2018. Its proposition is explicit about being more than capital: portfolio companies get direct access to Microsoft's distribution, enterprise tooling, and - per the firm's own 'Advantage' materials - dedicated AI compute including supercomputer-scale GPU access for model training. The firm operates as a single evergreen fund capitalized directly off Microsoft's balance sheet, and removed restrictive corporate terms from its term sheets in 2019 specifically to stay founder-aligned rather than strategically entangled. In its first six years, Microsoft said M12 had invested in more than 100 companies, including 15 unicorns and 6 IPOs, focused on AI applications, AI security, AI cloud infrastructure, and deep tech systems.
Cloudflare's 2019 NYSE IPO, ranked by Dealroom as an M12 portfolio outcome valued at $4.4 billion - sourced from a secondary database rather than Microsoft's own materials, so treated as secondary-verified