Google partnered with Accel to find and fund AI startups in India in a first-of-its-kind partnership for the Google AI Futures Fund, launched earlier this year.
On Tuesday, Accel and Google was announced a partnership to jointly invest up to $2 million in each startup through Accel’s Atoms program, with both companies 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, as well as support AI products made in India for global markets,” Accel partner Prayank Swaroop told TechCrunch.
India is an attractive market with the world’s second largest internet and smartphone base after China and its deep engineering talent. However, it is also a country that lacks frontier model development and has not spawned many companies pushing the technical frontier of AI, where development remains concentrated in the US and China.
However, activity is beginning to shift as major companies including OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced offices in the country and global investors are stepping 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 turn talent and demand into original research and products.
Swaroop said the investments will be geared towards almost any sector: creativity, entertainment, coding and work. “The future of work here is more inclusive, which is essentially SaaS, and all the other applications,” he told TechCrunch. “It could even be fundamental models.”
Swaroop said the companies will also look to identify areas where the big language models are likely to move in the next 12-24 months and look for Indian startups in those directions.
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In addition to capital, founders will receive up to $350,000 in computing credits on Google Cloud, Gemini, and DeepMind, as well as 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 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 artificial intelligence creation ecosystem, the companies said.
“India has an incredible history of innovation, and we strongly believe that its founders will lead the next generation of AI-led global technology,” Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of the Google AI Futures Fund, told TechCrunch. “This is Futures Fund’s first such partnership anywhere in the world and we chose India for a reason. Google has been a committed partner in the country’s digital transformation journey, with multi-billion dollar investments over the years.”
The partnership follows Google’s recent $15 billion plan to build a 1 gigawatt data center and AI hub in India. The company also announced a $10 billion digitization fund in 2020, which has backed the likes of 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 started it AI Futures Fund in May as an exclusive vehicle for investing in and partnering with AI startups worldwide. It has backed companies such as Replit and Harveyand has also directly invested in Indian startups such as Toonsutra and STAN.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google would appear on the capital boards of startups funded through the partnership and would be a “material presence,” but declined to share how its shareholdings would compare to Accel’s.
“This is our effort to partner with the market leader in the space who knows the country incredibly well, which can get us talking to early stage founders at an early informational stage, which can move the needle,” Silber said.
While the use of Google products is, perhaps, a given for applicants to this program, both Silber and Swaroop told TechCrunch that there will be no requirements for startups to exclusively use Gemini or any other Google product.
“Sometimes, Google’s technology is the best. Other times, you’ll see Anthropic or OpenAI. So we don’t set strict requirements that say you can only use Google’s models,” said Silber. “What we’re hoping to do, though, is find some different unique integrations that we can do with these companies that leverage Google’s AI technology.”
Launching in 2021, Accel’s pre-seed and seed platform Atoms has backed more than 40 companies that have collectively raised over $300 million in follow-on funding. The company expanded the program this year to include founders of Indian origin based abroad.
The latest partnership comes days after Accel teamed up with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms X, backing Indian early-stage founders building large-scale solutions with the potential to serve the masses in the country.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google isn’t structuring the partnership as a path to future acquisitions or even future cloud customers.
“We’re not a sales force, so we’re not looking to sign up new customers to the cloud. That’s not our goal,” he said. “In terms of KPIs, our goal is simply to see the next wave of AI innovation coming out of India.”
