Google and Accel are started to discover and invest in India’s startups AI companies as the two announce the first investment for earlier-stage startups under the Google AI Futures Fund, rolled out earlier this year.
On Tuesday, Google and Accel said they were teaming up to co-invest up to $2 million in each startup through Accel’s Atoms program, with the firms chipping in as much as a combined $1 million. The 2026 batch will be concentrated on founders based in India and the Indian diaspora who are building AI products from scratch.
The idea is to build AI products for the hundreds of millions of Indians, but also for Indian businesses to use these AI products and deploy them globally,” Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel told TechCrunc.
India is an attractive market with the second-largest number of internet and smartphone users behind China, as well as abundant engineering talent. But it is also a country that does not have a frontier model development and has not yet produced many companies pursuing the technical frontier of AI, which is being developed mostly in the U.S. and China.
Activity is beginning to move, though; heavyweight companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have recently opened offices in the country and global investors are stepping up early-stage commitments. The bet is that a large, mobile-first population, growing cloud infrastructure and relatively low software costs could make India a substantial market for AI — if only the ecosystem can channel its talent and demand into original research and products.
Swaroop said investments can go across just about any category: creativity, entertainment, coding and work. “The future of work here is broader, it’s really SaaS and everything else,” he told TechCrunch. “Those could be base models even.
The firms will also try to uncover areas where large language models are expected to progress over the next 12–24 months and hunt for Indian startups that are building in those directions, Swaroop added.
In addition to funding, founders will receive up to $350,000 in compute credits for Google Cloud, Gemini and DeepMind plus early access to Gemini and DeepMind models, APIs and experimental features. The program will feature support from the Google Labs and DeepMind research teams, co-development opportunities, a monthly mentorship with experts from Accel and Google technical leads, as well as visits to London and the Bay Area, including attendance at Google I/O.
Founders will also receive marketing support via Accel and Google’s global channels in addition to access to the Atoms founder network and Google AI builder ecosystem, according to both companies.
“India has such a long history of innovation and we believe strongly that Indian founders will be core to the next generation of cloud computing,” Jonathan Silber, co-founder and general partner at Google AI’s fund told TechCrunch. “This is the Futures Fund’s first partnership anywhere in the world, and we chose India for a reason. Google has been a steadfast supporter in the country’s quest for digital transformation, with multibillion-dollar investments spanning many years.”
The pact with Australia comes after Google announced a $15 billion investment in India to build a 1-gigawatt data center and an artificial intelligence research hub. The company also launched a $10 billion digitization fund last year, which has invested in companies including Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Google last month, Google joined with Reliance to provide millions of Jio users free access to AI Pro.
The AI Futures Fund was introduced by Google in May as a dedicated investment to partner with and invest in AI startups across the world. It has supported companies such as Replit and Harvey, and also invested directly in Indian startups like Toonsutra and STAN.
Google will be listed on the cap tables of startups that are funded through the partnership and will have “a material presence,” though Silber did not say how Google’s equity stakes would stack up against Accel’s.
“This is our way to partner with the category leader in space [who] understands the country really well, knows how we get in front of founders earlier in an informative and educational manner, that can be more meaningful for us,” Silber added.
While Google products may be a no-brainer for applicants to this program (Silber and Swaroop both told me as much) there won’t necessarily be mandates set that require fledgling companies to use Gemini or any other Google product.
“Google’s technology is the best one at times. Other times you will see Anthropic or OpenAI. so we’re not making hard requirements that say you can only use Google’s models,” Silber said. “What we are hoping to do, though, is have a couple of unique integrations that we end up doing with these companies that leverage Google AI,” he said.
Atoms has supported more than 40 companies that have raised over $300 million in follow-on funding together since it was first introduced by Accel in 2021 as a pre-seed and seed platform. This year, the firm expanded this program to include founders of Indian background outside India.
The newest collaboration follows the recent announcement of a partnership with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms X, (earlier this week), supporting early-stage Indian founders striving to bring massive solutions to scale that serve millions and billions of Indians.
The partnership is not a way for Google to lure GitLab toward future acquisition or even new cloud customers, Silber told TechCrunch.
“We’re not a sales team, so we don’t actively go in and sign up new cloud customers. That is not our objective,” he said. “In terms of KPIs, our goal is just to look for the next wave of innovation that comes out in AI space from India.”
