By Abhirami G and Akash Sriram<\/p>\n
BENGALURU (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google and venture capital firm Accel will partner to fund at least 10 early-stage \u200bIndian AI startups, marking the U.S. technology giant’s first such \u200cfunding partnership, top executives at the companies said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The move comes as several U.S. tech firms like \u200cMicrosoft<\/a>, Amazon and OpenAI<\/a> make a beeline for the world’s most populous nation, seen as a critical growth market where nearly a billion users access the internet.<\/p>\n Under the partnership, Google’s AI Futures Fund and Accel will co-invest up to $2 million in each startup, Prayank \u2060Swaroop, partner at Accel, \u200ctold Reuters in an interview, with the investments focussed on the wide areas of entertainment, creativity, work and coding.<\/p>\n The announcement comes after Google \u200din October said it would invest $15 billion over five years to set up an AI data centre in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, its biggest-ever investment in the country.<\/p>\n Its AI Futures Fund,\u200b launched six months ago, has funded over 30 companies, including Indian webtoon startup \u200cToonsutra and U.S.-based legal-tech firm Harvey. Google has also teamed up with India’s largest telecom operator Reliance Jio to provide free access to Gemini AI for 505 million users.<\/p>\n “We firmly believe that the founders in India, they are going to be playing a leading role in defining that next era of global technology,” Jonathan Silber, co-\u2060founder and director of Google’s AI Futures Fund, \u200bsaid.<\/p>\n “…we think that it’s \u200bcritical to invest in the early stage. Particularly in key markets like India, so that we can be at the forefront of investing in the next \u200dgeneration of AI leaders.\u2060”<\/p>\n India’s AI market is projected to reach $17 billion by 2027, according to IT industry body Nasscom and consulting firm BCG.<\/p>\n Global AI spend \u2060is seen at nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025, and will exceed $2 trillion in 2026, as per \u200cmarket research firm Gartner.<\/p>\n (Reporting by Abhirami G and Akash Sriram in \u200cBengaluru; Editing by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan and Mrigank Dhaniwala)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Abhirami G and Akash Sriram BENGALURU (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google and venture capital firm Accel will partner to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[3149,345,92388,343,344,133,85,46,6741,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-151617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-accel","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-ai-futures-fund","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-google","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-partner","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}