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At the Google AI Startups Conclave, Google reinforced its commitment to supporting India's startup ecosystem across the full AI lifecycle, focusing on infrastructure, models, datasets, and specialised programs.
Preeti Lobana, Country Manager for India at Google, noted that "Indian startups are building serious deep technology and solving population-scale problems with AI," emphasising that Google's focus is on supporting them across skills, infrastructure, trust, and market access. To address the hurdles founders face when scaling, Google launched the Google Market Access Program, a first-of-its-kind initiative designed to help Indian startups bridge the gap between local pilots and global scale. Lobana explained that while the path from labs to prototypes has become robust, "the scaling journey continues to be where a lot of startups struggle," and this new program aims to provide enterprise readiness through specialised curricula and direct introductions to a global network of CIOs and CXOs. The company also introduced new additions to its Gemma open model family to fuel deep-tech innovation. MedGemma 1.5 was launched to support advanced medical diagnostics, enabling startups to work with high-dimensional medical imaging modalities such as CT scans, MRIs, and whole-slide histopathology. This release follows a collaboration with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build India's Health Foundation Models. Simultaneously, Google also introduced FunctionGemma, a lightweight model optimised for function calling that enables the development of on-device, agent-based systems. This model allows AI applications to take secure, reliable action locally, even on low-end devices without a constant internet connection, helping startups build low-latency applications with automated workflows. These initiatives come as the 'Bharat AI Startups Report 2026' projects India's AI market to reach $126 billion by 2030, with 47% of enterprises already moving pilots into production. The report suggests that "Bharat-tested" is becoming the new gold standard for resilience, as an AI agent working reliably for a rural user in India is often robust enough for the global market. To support this growth, Google is investing in physical infrastructure, such as the 1-gigawatt Global AI Hub in Visakhapatnam, and providing high-quality datasets through Project Vaani, which has made over 27,000 hours of data for over 100 Indic languages freely available. By combining these resources, Google aims to ensure that Indian startups have the "full-stack support necessary to lead the global AI era". (ANI)
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