Google Cloud Announces New Initiatives To Foster Early Stage Indian AI Startups

Google Cloud has announced a slew of new partnerships and programmes to foster the growth of early-stage artificial intelligence (AI) startups in the country.

The initiatives were announced at Google’s AI Startups Summit in Bengaluru on Thursday (November 7).

At the event, the company said that select early-stage founders will receive $200K in Google Cloud credits under its Google for Startups Cloud Program. Additionally, AI-first startups selected under the same initiative will be able to avail $350K in Google Cloud credits.

In a statement, Google also said that it has partnered with incubator Y Combinator to offer access to NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), Google Cloud tensor processing units (TPUs), cloud credits and mentorship to startups selected under its Summer 2024 cohort of AI-first startups. 

Additionally, Google will collaborate with the likes of accelerators and incubators such as 500, StartX, Berkeley Skydeck, among others to offer guidance, and technical workshops to budding AI startups in the country.

Meanwhile, the company also touted its recently launched “Emerging ISV Partner Springboard” initiative at the event. The 12-week programme will offer support to AI startups for building go-to-market assets, product refinement, guidance on technical architecture, best practices, among others. 

“Google is committed to empowering AI startups to drive innovation and growth. These initiatives demonstrate our dedication to providing critical support and resources to early-stage founders, helping them build and scale successful AI- powered businesses,” said senior director of research at Google DeepMind Manish Gupta.

The event also saw Google Cloud announcing a partnership with healthtech startup DeliverHealth to build clinical documentation solutions. Under the collaboration, Google Cloud said that its Gemini 1.5 Pro multimodal AI models power DeliverHealth’s products, which allow clinicians to document patient journeys entirely through voice including aspects such as lab result summaries and inpatient notes. 

“Our collaboration with DeliverHealth is a reflection of our shared commitment towards innovation through the transformative potential of GenAI by automating tedious tasks and improving efficiency and accuracy. Together, we aim to reimagine the future of clinical documentation, enabling clinicians to focus more on patient care,” said vice president and country managing director  of Google Cloud India Bikram Singh Bedi.

Chiming in, DeliverHealthCEO Sasanka Yellamanchali added, “DeliverHealth is thrilled to partner with Google Cloud to bring the most precise and intuitive medical speech engine in healthcare directly to those on the frontlines… With Google Cloud’s AI models and our ability to create human-curated medical documentation, clinicians can simply speak and know their words will be accurately transformed into structured, billable documentation…”

India is home to more than 100 GenAI startups that have raised more than $600 Mn between 2019 and 2023.