From Seed to Scale: Partnering with India’s Startups to Build the AI Future

India’s AI startup story has entered a decisive new phase.

We are moving from prototypes to products, and from early traction to sustainable businesses. This is visible daily: doctors in Tier-2 cities improving screening, farmers receiving hyper-local alerts, and teachers using voice tools for vernacular learning. These are not isolated experiments; they are signals of what is possible when AI is applied at India’s scale.

At the Google AI Startups Conclave in New Delhi today, we reaffirmed our commitment: if you solve for India, you build for the world. Our focus now is accelerating how quickly Indian startups can scale, reach global markets, and deliver outcomes.

Google’s full-stack support to startups

That is why we are strengthening our full-stack support for startups across the lifecycle, from capability building to real-world deployment and scale. Google’s full-stack support focuses on removing challenges at every critical stage:

• Powerful AI Infrastructure: Ensuring founders can build on the same secure, scalable infrastructure that powers Google, supported by large-scale clean energy and global data center capacity. Our upcoming Global AI Hub in Visakhapatnam will further strengthen this foundation, providing a future-ready, 1-gigawatt anchor for the AI economy.
• World-Class Models: We are giving startups access to our most capable models, including Gemini for complex reasoning and Gemma for open research, enabling them to build state-of-the-art applications.
• AI-Powered Safety: Pioneering Private AI Compute in the cloud, combining Gemini’s power with on-device security assurances to keep sensitive data accessible only to the user are enabling founders to build powerful and safe applications
• Holistic Support: Finally, we are nurturing the builders themselves. From skilling thousands of new developers, to refining products in our AI Accelerators, to providing capital via the AI Futures Fund, we are with you at every step.

Bridging the Gap: The Google Market Access Program

As startups mature, a new challenge emerges. Many teams have strong products, but the transition from a successful pilot to repeatable enterprise adoption is difficult. This is the moment where access, trust, and go-to-market execution become decisive. To support startups through this transition, we are proud to launch the Google Market Access Program.

This is a purpose-built engine for AI-first startups ready to scale responsibly, focused on three outcomes: enterprise readiness through global selling expertise, access to Google’s enterprise network, and global immersion in key international markets. Applications are now open.

New Models Built for India’s Diversity and Scale

Strong products are built on strong foundations. To further fuel deep-tech innovation by Indian startups, we announced new additions to our open Gemma model family, focused on two areas seeing rapid adoption in India: population-scale healthcare AI and action-oriented, on-device agents.

MedGemma 1.5 builds on the momentum of our health-focused AI work. The new open 4-billion parameter model enables developers to build applications that support complex medical imaging workflows, including those that involve 3D volumes like CT and MRI scans, whole slide histopathology, chest X-ray longitudinal analysis and anatomical localization, and extraction of content from medical lab reports.

The release of MedGemma 1.5 follows Google’s recent collaboration with India’s flagship medical institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), which is leveraging MedGemma to build India’s Health Foundation Models, contributing to India’s Digital Public Infrastructure and the outcomes being made available to the ecosystem.

Alongside healthcare, we are also seeing strong momentum toward agent-based systems. To support this shift, we introduced FunctionGemma, a specialized version of the Gemma 3 270M model tuned for function calling.

FunctionGemma helps translate natural language commands into executable actions, allowing startups to build on-device, low-latency applications with automated workflows. The model supports the cost-effective and lightning-fast development of mobile solutions that respect user privacy and can work seamlessly even on low-end devices without a constant internet connection.

Together, these models expand the set of production-ready building blocks available to Indian founders, helping them move from experimentation to deployment across healthcare, enterprise, and consumer applications at scale.

Access MedGemma on HuggingFace and Vertex AI. FunctionGemma is supported by popular tools across the entire workflow, including Hugging Face Transformers, Unsloth, Keras or NVIDIA NeMo, and can be deployed using LiteRT-LM, vLLM, MLX, Llama.cpp, Ollama, Vertex AI or LM Studio

The $126 Billion Opportunity

Alongside the Conclave, Inc42 released the 'Bharat AI Startups Report 2026', supported by Google. The findings confirm a decisive shift in the ecosystem:

• From Pilot to Production: India’s AI market is projected to hit $126 billion by 2030. Crucially, 47% of enterprises are already moving pilots into production.
• The Innovation cost is Falling: Historically, high compute costs acted as a barrier on Indian ambition. With public rails lowering entry barriers, founder capital is shifting from infrastructure cost to funding product innovation.
• India as the Global ‘Stress Test’: We often view India’s complexity—22 languages, patchy connectivity, and price sensitivity—as a challenge. The report reframes it as our biggest asset. If an AI agent works reliably for a rural user in India, it is robust enough for the world. "Bharat-tested" is becoming the new gold standard for resilience.
• Trust is the New Moat: The competitive edge has shifted to trust-by-design. Startups that embed safety, privacy, and security from day one, aren't just "compliant", they are the only ones winning the long-term enterprise contracts.

Building for Outcomes

Ultimately, the AI era will be defined by outcomes, not just output. Ultimately, the AI era will be defined by outcomes. We see this in startups such as Cloudphysician reducing ICU mortality rates by 40% and Rocket Learning personalizing education for millions, among many others.

By stitching together skilling, capital, infrastructure, and market access, we are clearing the path for founders. As we look to the AI Impact Summit in February, the signal is clear: The future of AI isn't just being used in India; it is being built here.