Over 100 startups just got a front-row seat to Google’s AI ambitions — and what they’re building says a lot about where the Google Gemini Startup Forum is pushing the industry. Google announced the second cohort of its Gemini Startup Forum on May 13, 2026, and the lineup is genuinely interesting. Not just because of the scale, but because of what these companies are actually trying to do with Gemini’s multimodal capabilities. This isn’t a badge program. It’s a signal about how Google plans to entrench Gemini as the default infrastructure layer for the next wave of AI-native companies.
What the Gemini Startup Forum Actually Is
Let’s back up. Google launched the first Gemini Startup Forum in 2025 as part of its broader Google for Startups initiative. The idea was straightforward: identify early-stage and growth-stage companies building meaningfully on Gemini models, give them access to Google engineers and product teams, and accelerate their development cycles. Think of it as part cohort program, part developer relations strategy, part competitive moat-building.
The timing wasn’t accidental. 2025 was the year OpenAI’s API dominance started feeling less inevitable. Anthropic’s Claude was gaining serious enterprise traction, Meta’s open-source Llama models were eating into the experimental end of the market, and Google needed a credible answer to the question: “Why build on Gemini?” The Startup Forum was part of that answer.
Now the second cohort is here, set to convene in June 2026, and it’s roughly double the size of the first. That growth alone tells you something — either the program delivered real value the first time around, or the interest in Gemini’s capabilities has genuinely spiked. Probably both.
Who’s in the Cohort and What They’re Building
More than 100 startups made the cut this time. Google hasn’t released a full public list of every company, but the cohort spans a wide range of sectors — healthcare, legal tech, education, software development, creative tools, and enterprise productivity. That breadth is intentional. Google wants to show that Gemini isn’t a single-use model; it’s a platform.
A few patterns stand out when you look at the types of companies involved:
- Multimodal-first applications: A significant chunk of the cohort is building products that depend on Gemini’s ability to handle text, images, audio, and video simultaneously. This is where Gemini has a genuine technical edge over some competitors, and these startups are betting on it.
- Long-context use cases: Gemini’s context window — up to 1 million tokens in the 1.5 Pro and 2.0 series — is a serious differentiator for companies doing document analysis, legal review, or research synthesis. Several startups in this cohort are exploiting exactly that.
- Agentic workflows: A growing number of these companies aren’t just using Gemini to answer questions. They’re building agents that take multi-step actions — booking, researching, summarizing, filing. The agentic AI wave is clearly reflected in this cohort’s composition.
- Vertical AI tools: Rather than building generic AI assistants, many of these startups are going deep on specific industries — medical coding, construction project management, legal contract review. Vertical focus is where the defensible businesses are, and Google seems to understand that.
- Developer tooling: A subset of the cohort is building tools that help other developers work with AI more effectively — evaluation frameworks, fine-tuning pipelines, and observability layers for production AI systems.
What you won’t find much of is pure chatbot wrappers. That phase of AI startup investment is largely over, and this cohort reflects that reality.
What Participants Actually Get
The program isn’t just a logo and a LinkedIn badge. Accepted startups get access to Google Cloud credits, direct office hours with Gemini product and engineering teams, mentorship from Google leaders, and early access to new Gemini features before they’re publicly available. That last part is probably the most valuable. If you’re building a product on Gemini, knowing what’s coming six months out is a significant competitive advantage.
There’s also a community dimension — founders in the cohort get to interact with each other, which matters more than it sounds. Some of the best partnerships and integrations in tech have come out of accelerator cohorts where companies realize they’re solving adjacent problems.
How This Compares to What OpenAI and Anthropic Are Doing
Google isn’t alone in trying to build startup loyalty around its models. OpenAI’s Startup Fund has been investing in companies building on GPT-4 and its successors for years. Anthropic has its own partnership programs. Microsoft, through its Azure OpenAI services, has arguably done the most aggressive job of tying startups to a specific model provider through cloud credits and enterprise distribution.
But Google’s approach has a few distinct angles. First, the integration with Google Cloud is deeper than it looks on paper — startups in the program get a clearer path to enterprise distribution through Google’s sales channels, which is genuinely valuable if you’re trying to sell to large organizations. Second, Google’s multimodal story is more cohesive right now than OpenAI’s (though GPT-4o has closed that gap considerably). Third, the Gemini API’s pricing structure has been competitive, and for startups watching burn rate, that matters.
The risk, of course, is lock-in. Building deeply on any single provider’s API creates dependency. But that’s a trade-off every startup in this space is already navigating.
What This Tells Us About Google’s Actual Strategy
Here’s the thing: Google has historically been better at building foundational technology than at building developer communities around it. The search giant’s track record with developer programs is mixed at best. Remember Google+? The original Google Glass developer program? The frequency with which Google kills products has made developers cautious about betting their businesses on Google infrastructure.
The Gemini Startup Forum feels like a conscious effort to change that perception. By creating a repeating cohort structure with real resources attached, Google is signaling that Gemini is a long-term platform commitment, not a trend it’ll abandon when the next shiny thing arrives. Whether that signal is credible is something founders in the program will judge for themselves over the next 12 months.
What’s also notable is the timing. Google I/O 2026 is approaching, and the announcement of this cohort just before that event is clearly designed to show momentum. When Sundar Pichai talks about Gemini’s developer traction at I/O, this cohort will be part of that story. That’s not cynical — it’s just how these announcements work. The question is whether the substance matches the narrative.
The pattern here also mirrors what we’ve been seeing across the industry. As we noted in our piece on how enterprises are actually scaling AI in 2026, the companies making the most progress aren’t just buying access to models — they’re building tight integrations with specific providers and going deep rather than broad. The startups in this cohort seem to understand that.
The Competitive Pressure Driving All of This
It’s also worth understanding the competitive pressure Google is operating under. Gemini has had a complicated public narrative — the rollout of early versions attracted criticism, and OpenAI’s brand recognition with developers remains stronger. Programs like this are partly technical enablement and partly perception management. If 100+ credible startups are publicly building on Gemini, that changes how other founders think about the platform.
Google has also been investing hard in the underlying capabilities that matter to these startups. The jump from Gemini 1.0 to the 2.0 series brought meaningful improvements in reasoning and multimodal understanding. Gemini’s integration into Android’s core AI layer means that startups building consumer apps get distribution benefits that pure API providers can’t match. And Gemini’s browser-level integrations are creating new surface areas that startups can build on top of.
For founders evaluating which platform to build on, that full-stack story — from model to browser to mobile OS — is genuinely compelling. OpenAI can offer a great model and a growing API. Google can offer that plus distribution channels that touch billions of users daily. The startups in this cohort are presumably making that calculation consciously.
Key Takeaways
- The second Google Gemini Startup Forum cohort includes 100+ startups across healthcare, legal tech, education, developer tools, and enterprise productivity
- Participants get Google Cloud credits, direct access to Gemini engineering teams, mentorship, and early feature access
- The cohort skews heavily toward multimodal, long-context, and agentic AI applications — the areas where Gemini has technical differentiation
- Google’s full-stack distribution advantage (Android, Chrome, Cloud) gives this program a different value proposition than OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s startup initiatives
- The program convenes in June 2026, just after Google I/O, suggesting it’ll factor into Google’s public momentum narrative
- For founders: this is a real program with real resources attached, but platform dependency risk is real and worth modeling explicitly
FAQ
What is the Google for Startups Gemini Startup Forum?
It’s a cohort program run by Google for Startups where early-stage and growth-stage companies building on Gemini AI get access to Google Cloud credits, engineering mentorship, and early feature previews. The second cohort, announced in May 2026, includes over 100 companies and will convene in June 2026.
Who is eligible to apply for the Gemini Startup Forum?
The program targets startups that are actively building products on the Gemini API or Google Cloud AI services. While Google hasn’t published strict eligibility criteria publicly, the cohort skews toward companies using Gemini’s multimodal or long-context capabilities in meaningful ways — not surface-level integrations.
How does this compare to OpenAI’s startup programs?
OpenAI’s Startup Fund takes equity stakes in companies, while Google’s Gemini Forum is a non-equity accelerator focused on technical enablement and distribution. Google’s program offers broader platform distribution advantages through Android and Chrome, while OpenAI’s brand recognition with developers currently remains stronger in many markets.
What AI models do participating startups primarily use?
The cohort is built around Gemini 2.0 and its variants, including Gemini 2.0 Flash and Pro. Several use cases leverage the 1-million-token context window available in Gemini 1.5 Pro and later models, which enables document analysis and research workflows that aren’t feasible with shorter-context models like earlier GPT-4 versions.
The June forum will be worth watching closely — not just for the companies that emerge from it, but for what Google chooses to showcase as its flagship Gemini success stories heading into the second half of 2026. I wouldn’t be surprised if several of these startups become acquisition targets within 18 months, given how aggressively the major cloud providers have been consolidating AI capabilities. The real test is whether Google can turn this cohort into a sticky developer base, or whether these founders quietly hedge their bets and start building on multiple model providers simultaneously — which, honestly, most of them probably already are.
