In addition to helping Y Combinator, Google hopes that the offering will encourage AI startups to apply for funding as many struggle with a lack of compute resources.
Google Cloud is offering Y Combinator startups access to a subsidised cluster of Nvidia GPUs and Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) to build artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Y Combinator offers funding to early-stage startups, running investment rounds twice a year. Among those to have received funding are Airbnb, Coinbase, GitLab, DoorDash, Dropbox, and more than 1,000 others.
“We want to surround them with a lot of love and warmth early in their life cycle so they get familiarised with building and working on the Google Cloud Platform,” General Manager for Google Cloud’s Startups and AI Business, James Lee told TechCrunch. “As they stick around, we grow as they grow, and we become a partner of theirs throughout their life cycle.
The cloud giant is offering priority access to the Summer 2024 cohort of startups, as well as $350,000 in cloud credits for AI startups ($200,000 for other types of startups) over two years.
The exact number of GPUs and TPUs being offered has not been revealed, though Google has confirmed it will be Nvidia H100 GPUS and is a “sufficient” amount for foundation model companies to train AI models on.
The idea is that should those startups be successful (5% of Y Combinator startups have become ‘unicorns’ with more than billion-dollar valuations in the last 18 years), Google will already be a partner.
“There’s a lot of excitement that the next generation of startups will probably not just be unicorns, but decacorn, and they’re getting built as we speak,” said Diana Hu of Y Combinator. “Cloud providers are still catching up in terms of how to price them, but they do know if you catch them early on, you’re going to ride the wave with them.”
In addition to helping Y Combinator, Google hopes that the offering will encourage AI startups to apply for funding as many struggle with a lack of compute resources.
“For GPU and AI workloads, they’re more like high-performance computing workloads in batches. You don’t need the server running all the time, but you need a lot of them in a spiky workload,” said Hu. “So we have a dedicated cluster that YC companies can just use.”
Beyond the access to GPUs and TPUs, the startups will get $12,000 in Enhanced Support credits and can connect with Google’s internal AI experts.
According to Google, Y Combinator companies already using Google Cloud include AssemblyAI, which provides multilingual Speech AI models, and Klarity.ai, which automates business workflows that require document processing.
