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 AI startups in a first-of-its-kind partnership for the Google AI Futures Fund, which 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 building AI products from day one.

“The thought process is to build AI products for billions of Indians, and support AI products built in India for the global markets,” Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch.

India is an attractive market with the second largest internet and smartphone base in the world after China and its deep tech talent. Yet it is also a country that lacks frontier model development and has not produced many companies pushing the technical boundaries of AI, where development remains concentrated in the US and China.

However, activity is starting to shift as major companies including OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced offices in the country, and global investors are ramping up their early commitments. The bet is that a large, mobile-first population, growing cloud infrastructure and relatively low software costs can make India a meaningful AI market – if the ecosystem can translate talent and demand into original research and products.

Swaroop said the investments will be focused on almost every area: 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. “They could even be fundamental models.”

Swaroop said the companies will also look to identify areas where major language models are likely to develop over the next 12 to 24 months and look for Indian startups building in that direction.

In addition to capital, founders receive up to $350,000 in compute credits for Google Cloud, Gemini and DeepMind, as well as early access to Gemini and DeepMind models, APIs and experimental features. The program includes support from Google Labs and DeepMind research teams, co-development opportunities, monthly mentorship with Accel partners and Google technical leaders, 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 AI builder 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 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 good reason. Google has been a committed partner in the country’s journey to digital transformation, with billions of dollars invested 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 digitalization fund in 2020, which has backed companies like Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Last month, Google partnered with Reliance to provide millions of Jio users with 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 Harveyand 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 to Accel’s.

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

While using Google products may be a given for applicants to this program, both Silber and Swaroop told TechCrunch that there would be no requirements for startups to exclusively use Gemini or another Google product.

“Sometimes Google’s technology is the best. Other times you see Anthropic or OpenAI. So we don’t set hard requirements that say you can only use Google’s models,” Silber said. “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.”

Launched in 2021, Atoms, Accel’s pre-seed and seed platform, has backed 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 abroad.

The latest partnership comes days after Accel teamed up 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 force, so we’re not specifically looking for new cloud customers. That’s not our goal,” he said. “In terms of KPIs, our goal is simply to see the next wave of innovation in AI coming out of India.”