Google has partnered with Accel to find and fund India’s first AI startups 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 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 who are building AI products from day one.
“The thought process is building AI products for billions of Indians, as well as supporting AI products built in India for global markets,” Accel partner Prayank Swaroop told TechCrunch.
India is an attractive market with the second largest internet and smartphone base in the world after China and its deep engineering talent. Yet it is also a country that lacks the development of pioneering models and has not produced many companies pushing the technical frontiers of AI, whose development remains concentrated in the United States and China.
The business is starting to change, however, as major companies including OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced offices in the country, and global investors step up their early-stage commitments. The bet is that a large, mobile-first population, expanding cloud infrastructure and relatively low software costs could transform India into a significant market for AI – if the ecosystem can translate talent and demand into original research and products.
Swaroop said investments will be directed toward just about any field: creativity, entertainment, coding and work. “The future of work here is broader, and it’s basically SaaS and all the other applications,” he told TechCrunch. “They could even be founding models.”
Swaroop said companies will also try to identify areas where major language models are likely to make progress in the next 12-24 months and look for Indian startups that will expand in these directions.
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In addition to capital, founders will receive up to $350,000 in compute credits across 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 Atoms’ founder network and Google’s AI creation ecosystem, the companies said.
“India has an incredible history of innovation, and we firmly believe its founders will play a leading role in the next generation of global AI technology,” Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of the Google AI Futures Fund, told TechCrunch. “This is the Futures Fund’s first such collaboration globally, and we chose India for a reason. Google has been a committed partner in the country’s journey towards digital transformation, with multi-billion dollar investments over the years.”
This 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 digitalization fund in 2020, which supported companies such as 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. He has backed companies such as Replit and Harvey, and has also invested directly in Indian startups such as Toonsutra and STAN.
Silber told TechCrunch that Google would be on the capitalization tables of startups funded by the partnership and would be “a material presence,” but declined to share how its stock holdings would compare to Accel’s.
“This is our attempt to work with the market leader in the space who knows the country incredibly well, who can get us to talk to founders at an early stage at an early information stage, who can move things forward,” Silber said.
While using Google products may be a no-brainer for applicants to this program, Silber and Swaroop told TechCrunch that there would be no requirement 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 impose hard requirements that say you can only use Google’s models,” Silber said. “What we hope to do, though, is find some unique integrations that we can do with these companies that leverage Google AI technology.”
Launched in 2021, Accel’s pre-seed and seed platform, Atoms, has supported more than 40 companies that have collectively raised more than $300 million in follow-on funding. The company expanded the program this year to include founders of Indian origin based abroad.
The latest collaboration comes days after Accel partnered with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms
Silber told TechCrunch that Google is not structuring the partnership as a path to future acquisitions, or even future cloud customers.
“We’re not a sales team, so we’re not specifically looking to recruit new cloud customers. 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.”
