Google teams up with Accel to hunt for India’s next AI breakouts

Google has partnered with Accel to find and fund India’s earliest-stage 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 firms 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 building AI products for billions of Indians, as well as supporting AI products built in India for global markets,” Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch.

India is an appealing market with the world’s second-largest internet and smartphone base after China and its deep engineering talent. Still, it’s also a country that lacks frontier model development and hasn’t produced many companies pushing the technical frontier of AI, where development remains concentrated in the U.S. and China.

Activity is starting to shift, however, as major firms including OpenAI and Anthropic have recently announced offices in the country, and global investors step 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 translate talent and demand into original research and products.

Swaroop said investments will be geared toward just about any area: creativity, entertainment, coding, and work. “The future of work here is more encompassing, which is essentially SaaS, and all other applications,” he told TechCrunch. “It could even be foundational models.”

Swaroop said the firms will also try to identify areas where large language models are likely to advance over the next 12-24 months and look for Indian startups building in those directions.

Alongside 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 mentorship with Accel partners and Google technical leads, and immersion sessions in London and the Bay Area, including Google I/O. Founders will also get 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 firmly believe that its founders are going to be playing a leading role in the next generation of AI-led global technology,” Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of the Google AI Futures Fund, told TechCrunch. “This is the Futures Fund’s first such collaboration anywhere in the world, and we chose India for a reason. Google has been a committed partner in the country’s journey to digital transformation, with multibillion-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 firms including 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. It has backed companies including Replit and Harvey, and has also invested directly in Indian startups such as Toonsutra and STAN.

Silber told TechCrunch that Google would appear on the cap tables of startups funded through the partnership and would be “a material presence,” but declined to share how its equity stakes would compare with Accel’s.

“This is our attempt to work with the market leader in the space who knows the country incredibly well, that can get us talking to earlier-stage founders at an early informative stage, that can move the needle,” Silber said.

While using Google products is, perhaps, a given for applicants to this program, both Silber and Swaroop told TechCrunch there would 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’re not putting firm requirements that say you can only use Google’s models,” said Silber. “What we’re hoping to do, though, is find a couple of different 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 backed more than 40 companies that have collectively raised over $300 million in follow-on funding. The firm expanded the program this year to include Indian-origin founders based overseas.

The latest collaboration comes days after Accel’s partnership with Prosus to co-invest in Atoms X, backing early-stage Indian founders building large-scale solutions with the potential to serve the masses in the country.

Silber told TechCrunch that Google is not structuring the partnership as a pathway 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. “In terms of KPIs, our objective is simply to see the next wave of innovation in the AI space coming out of India.”