What Google's AI and cloud services team has to offer entrepreneurs

When it comes to picking AI tools, tech startups can look to leading models from frontier companies, or a cloud and enterprise stack from a tech giant.

Google’s pitch to them is that it offers both, according to Darren Mowry, VP of global startups and investor ecosystem at Google Cloud. The company bills itself as a complete package for startups: in-house Gemini models and TPU chips, cloud infrastructure tools, partnerships with the likes of Anthropic and Nvidia, and a marketplace where startups can sell to Google enterprise customers.

“[Microsoft and Amazon] have become almost AI resellers,” Mowry said. “The fact that we can play that middle ground allows us to say, ‘What is it that you’re trying to build, and how do we bring the right technology to bear?’”

Google is one of several AI providers competing to lure startups and small and medium-sized businesses to its services and platforms. Other services like Anthropic and OpenAI offer direct access to their own AI tools for small businesses.

Startup founders in the AI era tend to approach building a business differently than they might have in the past, Mowry said. With AI tools increasingly built into workflows, they’re more selective about making initial hires. They’re also more deliberate about raising funding, he said.

While much of Google’s cloud and AI offerings are centered on tech startups, especially those in the AI space, Mowry said Google is gearing up to announce more investments aimed at supporting small and medium-sized businesses in the next month or so.

“Watch this space,” he said. “We’re going to be making some very interesting additional investments in that space to help one-person, five-person, 20-person companies grow their businesses as well.”

Support staff

Mowry said Google has been investing in more staff to guide startups through the journey to revenue. A go-to-market team helps startups build pre-sales content and get listed on Google’s marketplace for its enterprise customers. Like with other cloud providers, Google enterprise customers who buy a startup’s tools through the marketplace can put that spend toward their cloud commitments.

“We’re hiring entire go-to-market and partner teams, whose sole job is to take a startup’s product and help them sell it,” Mowry said.

Google also offers engineering resources and a recently launched “founder advocacy organization,” where experienced startup entrepreneurs hired by Google can coach founders through various decisions along the way, Mowry said.

“Many of them will say, ‘I had more failed startups than I had successes.’ These aren’t necessarily people that have said, ‘I’ve had seven IPOs in my experience,’” Mowry said. “Building a business is really hard, and so I think it’s good to have people on the team that can talk about where things went sideways as well as where things went really well.”

Gemini seized on

There’s a lot of opportunity right now in building agents for back-office enterprise tasks, according to Mowry, and Google is helping emerging startups to identify use cases where they might have the expertise to enter the market.

“What we’re helping founders do at the moment is to say, what experiences do you have?” Mowry said. “Many of them have come from enterprises that had these problems, and how do we help you prioritize those one or two use cases that we know we can validate…and then we can swarm you with engineering resources, with credits, with capabilities to help you build those things out.”

As far as the types of companies that tend to gravitate more toward Google than its rivals, Mowry said retail is a big category because some e-commerce companies are wary of building a shopping platform in Amazon’s cloud. It’s also a popular choice for financial services companies, he said, and robotics and physical AI is a burgeoning category.

Google also continues to offer various cloud credit packages to qualifying startups, and Mowry said the company will “continue to innovate and advance and grow” that program. But founders have also shown interest in experts who can advise them on how to spend those credits, and that’s where the company wants to build out more in the future.

“Credits are important, but credits for us are the table stakes,” Mowry said. “It’s all the juicy value we wrap around those credits to me that really is the differentiator.”