New Delhi: At the Google AI Startups Conclave earlier, Google reaffirmed its commitment to supporting India’s startup ecosystem at all stages of the AI lifecycle anchored in pillars across Infrastructure, Models, Datasets, and Programs to support Indian founders.
Highlighting the current challenge for India’s mature and fast-growing startup ecosystem, Google announced the Google Market Access Program, a first-of-its-kind initiative to help Indian startups strengthen their go-to-market efforts, shortening the journey from local pilots to global scale.
Google also announced new additions to its Gemma open model family, designed to help startups build population-scale and production-ready AI applications.
-
MedGemma 1.5 addresses the growing demand for advanced healthcare AI, enabling startups to work with high-dimensional medical imaging at scale.
-
FunctionGemma, a lightweight model optimized for function calling, supports the next generation of on-device, agent-based systems, allowing AI applications to take secure, reliable action locally. Together, these models expand the building blocks available to developers creating real-world, deployable solutions.
Addressing an audience with the country’s leading founders, investors, and policymakers, Preeti Lobana, Country Manager for India, Google, said: “Indian startups are building serious deep technology and solving population-scale problems with AI. Google’s focus is to support them across the full stack, from skills and infrastructure to trust and market access. 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 Last Mile
Google launched the Google Market Access Program to help Indian AI startups bridge the gap between a successful technical pilot and securing long-term enterprise contracts. This program is purpose-built for AI-first startups that have moved beyond the prototype phase and are ready to scale responsibly.
The program is designed to support founders with three transformative outcomes:
-
Enterprise readiness through a specialized curriculum on global enterprise selling, complex pricing models, and international buyer psychology.
-
A global network through direct, facilitated introductions to relevant members of Google’s global network of CIOs and CXOs.
-
Global immersion in partnership with ecosystem leaders like TiE Silicon Valley and Alteus, to establish meaningful in-person relationships in key buyer markets and international tech hubs.
Applications for the Google Market Access Program are now open for eligible startups.
New models to support Indian innovation
To further fuel deep-tech innovation by Indian startups, Google announced new specialized variants of its Gemma open model family, designed to support advanced healthcare use cases and the growing shift toward agentic, on-device AI.
MedGemma 1.5 represents the next generation of Google’s medical AI. Building on the success of the company’s Health AI Developer Foundations program, this new open 4-billion parameter model enables developers to build applications that support complex medical imaging workflows, including those involving 3D volumes (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.
FunctionGemma, a specialized version of the Gemma 3 270M model, acts as a fully independent agent for private, offline tasks, or as an intelligent traffic controller for larger connected systems. It helps translate natural language commands into executable actions, allowing startups to build on-device, low-latency applications with automated workflows. FunctionGemma 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.
FunctionGemma supports a broad developer ecosystem and can be fine-tuned using popular tools such as Hugging Face Transformers, Unsloth, Keras, and NVIDIA NeMo, and deployed across platforms including LiteRT-LM, vLLM, Llama.cpp, Vertex AI, and other edge inference environments.
India’s $126 billion AI opportunity
Alongside the Google AI Startups Conclave, Inc42 released the ‘Bharat AI Startups Report 2026’, supported by Google. The report highlights several decisive shifts in the ecosystem:
-
From Pilot to Production: India’s AI market is projected to reach $126 billion by 2030. With 47% of enterprises already moving pilots into production, enterprise AI is leading the value pool. Consumer AI is driving scale and reach, growing on the back of adoption and distribution, with monetisation shifting towards recurring revenue like app subscriptions and in-app purchases.
-
The Innovation cost is Falling: Public rails like the IndiaAI Mission are helping lower entry barriers and compressing prototype-to-production timelines.
-
India as the Global ‘Stress Test’: India’s diversity and complexity is the country’s biggest asset. An AI agent working reliably for a rural user in India can be 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 are winning long-term enterprise contracts.
