Google has partnered with Accel to find and fund India’s earliest-stage AI startups. This marks a first-of-its-kind collaboration for the Google AI Futures Fund, which launched earlier this year. Accel and Google announced a partnership to jointly invest up to two million dollars in each startup through Accel’s Atoms program, with both firms contributing up to one million dollars. The 2026 cohort will focus on founders in India and the Indian diaspora who are building AI products from day one.
Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel, stated that the thought process is building AI products for billions of Indians, as well as supporting AI products built in India for global markets. India is an appealing market with the world’s second-largest internet and smartphone base after China, along with deep engineering talent. However, the country lacks frontier model development and has not produced many companies pushing the technical frontier of AI, where development remains concentrated in the United States and China.
Activity is starting to shift as major firms including OpenAI and Anthropic have recently announced offices in the country, and global investors step up early-stage commitments. The bet is that a large, mobile-first population, expanding cloud infrastructure, and relatively low software costs could turn India into a meaningful AI market, if the ecosystem can translate talent and demand into original research and products.
Swaroop said investments will be geared toward just about any area, including creativity, entertainment, coding, and work. He mentioned that the future of work is more encompassing, which includes SaaS and all other applications, and could even involve foundational models. He also said the firms will try to identify areas where large language models are likely to advance over the next twelve to twenty-four months and look for Indian startups building in those directions.
Alongside capital, founders will receive up to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in compute credits across Google Cloud, Gemini, and DeepMind. They will also get 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 mentorship with Accel partners and Google technical leads, and immersion sessions in London and the Bay Area, including Google I/O. Founders will also receive marketing support through Accel and Google’s global channels, as well as access to the Atoms founder network and Google’s AI builder ecosystem.
Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of the Google AI Futures Fund, said that India has an incredible history of innovation, and he believes its founders will play a leading role in the next generation of AI-led global technology. He noted this is the Futures Fund’s first such collaboration anywhere in the world, and they chose India for a reason. Google has been a committed partner in the country’s journey to digital transformation, with multibillion-dollar investments over the years.
The partnership follows Google’s recent fifteen-billion-dollar plan to build a one-gigawatt data center and AI hub in India. The company also announced a ten-billion-dollar digitization fund in 2020, which has backed firms including Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Last month, Google partnered with Reliance to offer millions of Jio users free access to AI Pro.
Google launched the AI Futures Fund in May as a dedicated vehicle to invest in and collaborate with AI startups globally. It has backed companies including Replit and Harvey, and has also invested directly in Indian startups such as Toonsutra and STAN.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google would appear on the cap tables of startups funded through the partnership and would be a material presence, but declined to share how its equity stakes would compare with Accel’s. He described this as an attempt to work with the market leader in the space who knows the country incredibly well to talk to earlier stage founders.
While using Google products is perhaps a given for applicants to this program, both Silber and Swaroop said there would be no requirements for startups to exclusively use Gemini or any other Google product. Silber stated that sometimes Google’s technology is the best, and other times Anthropic or OpenAI might be used, so there are no firm requirements. The hope is to find unique integrations that leverage Google AI technology.
Launched in 2021, Accel’s pre-seed and seed platform, Atoms, has backed more than forty companies that have collectively raised over three hundred million dollars in follow-on funding. The firm expanded the program this year to include Indian-origin founders based overseas. This latest collaboration comes days after Accel’s partnership with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms X, backing early-stage Indian founders building large-scale solutions.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google is not structuring the partnership as a pathway to future acquisitions or even future cloud customers. He clarified that they are not a sales team and are not specifically looking to sign up new cloud customers. In terms of key performance indicators, the objective is simply to see the next wave of innovation in the AI space coming out of India.