Google sharpens focus on scaling Indian AI startups with new market access programme and open models
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Google has announced a new market access programme for Indian AI startups, alongside the launch of specialised open models for healthcare and on-device applications, as it sharpened its focus on helping founders move from pilots to global scale.
Unveiled at the Google AI Startups Conclave, the initiatives come at a time when India’s startup ecosystem is maturing but still struggling with what Google described as the “commercial last mile” which basically means converting promising prototypes into long-term enterprise contracts and global businesses.
“Indian startups are building serious deep technology and solving population-scale problems with AI,” said Preeti Lobana, country manager for India at Google. “While the path from labs to prototypes has become quite robust over the last several years, the scaling journey continues to be where a lot of startups struggle. The Google Market Access Program is designed to address this challenge faced by founders.”
Bridging the commercial gap
The newly launched Google Market Access Program targets AI-first startups that have crossed the prototype stage and are ready to expand internationally. It will focus on making founders enterprise-ready through training on global selling, complex pricing models, and buyer behaviour, while also providing curated introductions to Google’s global network of CIOs and CXOs. The programme will include international immersions in collaboration with ecosystem partners such as TiE Silicon Valley and Alteus.
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Applications for the programme are now open.
Alongside the commercial push, Google also announced two additions to its Gemma open model family, aimed at enabling more production-ready and population-scale AI use cases.
One of them, MedGemma 1.5, is designed for advanced healthcare applications. The 4-billion-parameter model can work with complex medical imaging formats such as CT and MRI scans, histopathology slides, and longitudinal chest X-rays, while also extracting information from lab reports.
The model builds on Google’s Health AI Developer Foundations programme and is already being used in collaboration with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to help develop India’s Health Foundation Models as part of the country’s digital public infrastructure push.
The second model, FunctionGemma, is a lightweight version optimised for function calling and on-device AI agents. It is designed to convert natural language commands into executable actions, enabling startups to build low-latency, privacy-preserving applications that can run even on low-end devices without constant internet access.
Google said FunctionGemma can be fine-tuned using popular tools such as Hugging Face Transformers and Keras, and deployed across multiple platforms, including Vertex AI and edge inference environments.
India’s AI moment
The announcements come as India’s AI market is projected to grow rapidly over the next few years. A new report by Inc42, supported by Google and released alongside the conclave, estimates the country’s AI market could reach $126 billion by 2030. Nearly half of enterprises are already moving from pilot projects to production, with enterprise AI leading the value pool.
The report also noted that falling innovation costs, driven by public digital rails such as the IndiaAI Mission, are compressing the time taken to move from prototypes to real-world deployment. Google highlighted that India’s scale and diversity are increasingly being seen as an advantage. Solutions that work reliably in India’s complex environments tend to be more robust globally, giving rise to what it called the “Bharat-tested” standard.
The tech giant also reiterated its broader investments in India’s AI ecosystem, including its upcoming Global AI Hub in Visakhapatnam, which will run on green energy and provide high-performance compute access for startups.
By combining infrastructure, specialised models, and new go-to-market pathways, Google said it is aiming to offer Indian founders full-stack support as they attempt to build globally competitive AI businesses.