Google Launches Market Access Programme to Scale Indian AI startups

Google has announced a new market access initiative and two open-source AI models to support Indian startups from early-stage development to global scale at the Google AI Startups Conclave held in the national capital.

Google Market Access Program aims to help Indian AI startups transition from pilot projects to long-term enterprise contracts.

“Indian startups are building serious deep technology and solving population-scale problems with AI,” said Preeti Lobana, VP and country manager for India at Google, in a statement. 

She said that although the journey from labs to prototypes has improved over the past few years, many startups continue to struggle with scaling, a gap the Google Market Access Program seeks to address.

The programme targets AI-first startups that have moved beyond the prototype stage and are preparing to scale. It will focus on enterprise readiness through structured training on global enterprise sales, pricing, and buyer behaviour, alongside facilitated introductions to Google’s global network of CIOs and CXOs. 

The initiative also includes international immersion programmes in partnership with ecosystem organisations, including TiE Silicon Valley and Alteus. Applications for the programme are now open.

Google also recently announced new additions to its Gemma open model family to support healthcare and on-device AI development.

One of the releases, MedGemma 1.5, is a 4-billion-parameter open-source model for medical AI applications. It supports high-dimensional medical imaging workflows, including CT and MRI scans, whole-slide histopathology, longitudinal chest X-ray analysis, anatomical localisation, and extraction of information from medical lab reports.

The model builds on Google’s Health AI Developer Foundations programme and follows its collaboration with All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which is using MedGemma to develop health foundation models as part of the country’s Digital Public Infrastructure.

Google also introduced FunctionGemma, a lightweight variant of the Gemma 3 270M model optimised for function calling and on-device AI agents. The model enables applications to convert natural language commands into executable actions locally, allowing AI systems to operate with low latency, limited connectivity, and enhanced user privacy.

FunctionGemma can be fine-tuned using tools such as Hugging Face Transformers, Keras, and NVIDIA NeMo, and deployed across environments including LiteRT-LM, vLLM, Llama.cpp, and Vertex AI.

Google said these efforts complement its ongoing investments in India’s AI infrastructure, including the Global AI Hub in Visakhapatnam, which provides a one-gigawatt compute foundation powered by green energy and Google’s AI chips.

The company also reiterated its focus on data availability, citing progress on Project Vaani in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science. The initiative has released more than 27,000 hours of speech data across over 100 Indic languages through the government’s Bhashini platform.

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