Google has partnered with Accel to find and fund early-stage Indian AI startups in a first-of-its-kind collaboration for the Google AI Futures Fund, launched earlier this yr.
Accel and Google on Tuesday announced a partnership to jointly invest up to $2 million in each startup under Accel’s Atoms program, with each firms contributing up to $1 million. The 2026 cohort will focus on founders in India and the Indian diaspora building AI products from day one.
“The thought process is to build AI products for billions of Indians and also support AI products made in India for global markets,” Prayank Swaroop, partner at Accel, told TechCrunch.
India is an attractive market with the world’s second-largest web and smartphone base after China and its deep engineering talent. Yet it is also a country that lacks frontier model development and has not produced many firms pushing the technical boundaries of AI, with development concentrated in the US and China.
Activity is starting to shift, nonetheless, as major firms including OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced the opening of offices in the country and global investors increase early-stage involvement. It is assumed that its large mobile-first population, growing cloud infrastructure and relatively low software costs could transform India into a significant AI market – if the ecosystem can translate talent and demand into original research and products.
Swaroop said investments might be targeted in almost every area: creativity, entertainment, coding and work. “The future of work here is more comprehensive and is essentially SaaS and all other applications,” he told TechCrunch. “They can even be entry-level models.”
Swaroop said firms will even try to discover areas where large language models are likely to expand in the next 12-24 months and look for Indian startups expanding in these directions.
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In addition to capital, founders will receive up to $350,000 in compute credits across Google Cloud, Gemini, and DeepMind, in addition to early access to Gemini and DeepMind models, APIs, and experimental features. The program will include support from Google Labs and DeepMind research teams, co-development opportunities, monthly mentoring with Accel partners and Google CTOs, and immersion sessions in London and the Bay Area, including Google I/O. Founders will even receive marketing support through Accel and Google’s global channels, in addition to access to the Atoms founder network and Google’s artificial intelligence developer ecosystem, the firms said.
“India has an incredible history of innovation, and we strongly believe its founders will play a leading role in the next generation of global AI-powered technology,” Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of the Google AI Futures Fund, told TechCrunch. “This is the first such cooperation of the Futures Fund in the world, and it is not without reason that we chose India. Google is a committed partner on the country’s path to digital transformation, having made multi-billion investments over the years.”
The partnership follows Google’s recent $15 billion plan to build a 1-gigawatt data center and artificial intelligence center in India. The company also announced a $10 billion digitalization fund in 2020, which backed firms corresponding to Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Last month, Google partnered with Reliance to offer thousands and thousands of Jio users free access to AI Pro.
Google launched AI Future Fund in May as a dedicated tool for investing in and collaborating with AI start-ups around the world. He supported firms corresponding to Replit and Harveyand has also invested directly in Indian startups corresponding to Toonsutra and STAN.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google will appear on the cap tables of startups funded through the partnership and might be a “significant presence,” but declined to share information on how its equity stake would differ from Accel’s.
“This is our attempt to partner with a market leader in this industry who knows the country incredibly well, so we can talk to the founders at an earlier stage, at an early information stage, that can move the needle,” Silber said.
While using Google products could also be a no-brainer for those applying to this program, each Silber and Swaroop told TechCrunch that startups will have no requirements to exclusively use Gemini or any other Google product.
“Sometimes Google’s technology is the best. Other times you’ll see Anthropic or OpenAI. That’s why we don’t have stringent requirements that say you can only use Google models,” Silber said. “But we hope to find some different unique integrations that we can do with companies that use Google AI technology.”
Launched in 2021, Accel’s pre-seed and seed platform, Atoms, has supported over 40 firms that have collectively raised over $300 million in follow-on funding. Business this yr we expanded the program include founders of Indian origin living abroad.
The latest collaboration comes days after Accel’s partnership with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms X, supporting early-stage Indian founders to build solutions at scale that may serve the masses in the country.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google does not plan the partnership as a path to future acquisitions or even future cloud customers.
“We’re not a sales team, so we don’t particularly care about acquiring new cloud customers. That’s not our goal,” he said. “In terms of KPIs, our goal is simply to see the next wave of innovation in the AI space coming out of India.”