Google and Accel have announced a first-of-its-kind partnership to identify and fund India’s earliest-stage AI startups, marking the inaugural external collaboration for the Google AI Futures Fund. Through Accel’s Atoms program, the firms will jointly invest up to $2 million per startup, with each contributing up to $1 million. The 2026 cohort will focus on founders in India and the Indian diaspora building AI-native 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’s vast internet user base, strong engineering talent, and growing cloud infrastructure make it an increasingly attractive AI market, even as frontier model development remains concentrated in the U.S. and China.
Momentum is beginning to shift. OpenAI and Anthropic have both announced offices in India, and global investors are increasing early-stage commitments. Accel says it will consider startups across creativity, productivity, entertainment, SaaS, developer tools, and even foundational models. The firms will also prioritize areas where LLMs are expected to advance over the next 12–24 months.
Founders selected for the program will receive up to $350,000 in compute credits across Google Cloud, Gemini, and DeepMind, early access to experimental models and APIs, mentorship from Accel partners and Google technical leaders, and immersion sessions in London and the Bay Area, including Google I/O. Support will also come from Google Labs and DeepMind research teams, plus marketing channels and the Atoms founder network.
Jonathan Silber, co-founder of the Google AI Futures Fund, emphasized India’s strategic importance: “This is the Futures Fund’s first such collaboration anywhere in the world, and we chose India for a reason.” The partnership follows Google’s recently unveiled $15 billion plan for a 1-gigawatt data center and AI hub in the country, as well as previous multibillion-dollar digital investments in Airtel, Jio, and Flipkart.
Google will appear directly on cap tables for startups funded through the program, though the company says there are no requirements to use Gemini or other Google products exclusively. “Sometimes Google’s technology is the best,” Silber said. “Other times, you’ll see Anthropic or OpenAI.”
Accel’s Atoms platform, launched in 2021, has already backed more than 40 companies that have raised over $300 million in follow-on funding. The new partnership with Google arrives shortly after Accel and Prosus launched Atoms X to support Indian founders building for massive domestic scale.
Silber stressed that the initiative is not structured as a sales funnel for Google Cloud or as a path to future acquisitions: “Our objective is simply to see the next wave of innovation in the AI space coming out of India.”
