Google has partnered with Accel to discover and fund early-stage AI startups in India in a first-of-its-kind collaboration for the Google AI Futures Fund, launched earlier this year.
On Tuesday, Accel and Google announced a partnership to co-invest up to $2 million in each startup through Accel's Atoms program, with each company contributing up to $1 million. The 2026 cohort will focus on Indian and Diaspora founders who are building AI products from day one.
“The thought process is to not only support AI products built in India for the global market, but to build AI products for billions of Indians,” Accel partner Prayank Swaroop told TechCrunch.
India is an attractive market with the world's second-largest internet and smartphone base after China and a wealth of engineering talent. Still, the country lacks the development of frontier models and does not produce many companies pushing the technological frontier of AI, with development still concentrated in the United States and China.
But activity is starting to change, with major companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic recently announcing offices in the country, and global investors stepping up early-stage commitments. If the ecosystem can translate talent and demand into original research and products, we believe India's large mobile-first population, expanding cloud infrastructure, and relatively low software costs could transform it into a meaningful AI market.
Swaroop said the investments will be in almost every sector including creativity, entertainment, coding and jobs. “The future of work here is going to be more inclusive. It's essentially SaaS and all other applications,” he told TechCrunch. “It could even become a foundational model.”
Swaroop said the companies will also seek to identify areas where large-scale language models are likely to advance in the next 12 to 24 months and look for Indian startups to build in that direction.
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In addition to funding, founders will receive up to $350,000 in compute credits across Google Cloud, Gemini, and DeepMind, as well as early access to models, APIs, and experimentation capabilities in Gemini and DeepMind. The program includes support from Google Labs and DeepMind research teams, co-development opportunities, monthly mentorship from Accel partners and Google technical leads, and intensive 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, the companies said.
“India has an incredible history of innovation, and we strongly believe that its founders will play a leading role in the next generation of AI-driven global technologies,” Jonathan Silver, co-founder and director of Google AI Futures Fund, told TechCrunch. “This is Futures Fund's first collaboration of its kind in the world, and we chose India for a reason. Google has invested billions of dollars over the years and has been a committed partner in the country's digital transformation efforts.”
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 the creation of a $10 billion digitization fund in 2020, which is backing companies such as Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Last month, Google partnered with Reliance to provide free access to AI Pro to millions of Jio users.
In May, Google launched the AI Futures Fund as a dedicated vehicle to invest in and collaborate with AI startups around the world. The company has backed companies such as Replit and Harvey, and has also invested directly in Indian startups such as Toonsutra and STAN.
Silver told TechCrunch that Google will appear on the cap tables of startups funded through the partnership and will be a “significant player,” but he declined to say how the company's stake would compare to Accel's stake.
“This is our attempt to work with a market leader in this space who knows the country very well and can talk to early-stage founders early in the information phase and move the needle,” Silver said.
While using Google products is probably a given for applicants to the program, both Silber and Swaroop told TechCrunch that startups don't need to use Gemini or any other Google product exclusively.
“Sometimes Google's technology is the best, and other times Anthropic and OpenAI come along, so we don't impose a strict requirement that you can only use Google's models,” Silver said. “But what we want to do is find some different and unique integrations that we can leverage Google AI technology to do with these companies.”
Founded in 2021, Accel's pre-seed and seed platform Atoms has supported over 40 companies that have collectively raised more than $300 million in follow-on funding. The company expanded its program this year to include Indian-origin founders based overseas.
The latest partnership comes days after Accel partnered with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms X, helping early-stage Indian founders build large-scale solutions that have the potential to serve the Indian masses.
Silver told TechCrunch that Google is not looking to build partnerships as a path to future acquisitions or even future cloud customers.
“We're not a sales team, so we're not specifically looking to sign up new cloud customers. That's not our goal,” he said. “When it comes to KPIs, our aim is simply to see the next wave of innovation in the AI space coming from India.”