India is a hotbed for global startups and one of the key global markets for Google Cloud, said a top company executive on Wednesday, June 12.

Matt Renner, president of global sales at Google Cloud, said the company has taken this fiscal year to specifically double down on its investments in startups.

“Among a handful of markets globally, we picked India because of the sheer volume and unbelievable upside of potential from global startups. India is an incredible place for innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). We are seeing customers push the envelope in AI innovation. We are well positioned with our AI expertise, tools and history, to help partner with them as we move forward”, he said.

In Bengaluru, Renner met a dozen startup founders across five different industries. He told them that discounts and credit will be offered to startups to make it easier for them to get started on Google Cloud.

The company has two different large data centres in India. After a day in Bengaluru, Renner will head to Mumbai to meet customers there.

India has big plans to offer digital public goods (DPG) and digital public infrastructure (DPI) across different domains and sectors.

"We have been working with Bengaluru-based non-profit EkStep Foundation (co-founded by Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani) to try and see how we can bring these not just to the Indian market but also perhaps take it to the international markets,” Bikram Singh, vice president and country managing director at Google Cloud India, told ET.

 “The benefit the ecosystem is seeing is about getting these DPG solutions and DPI solutions' sandboxes deployed in an accelerated fashion so that their users, customers and citizens of the country start using these better. We aren't really divulging the commercial details."

India hiring plans Google Cloud has spent a lot of focus and energy on hiring customer-facing people in India, Singh said, adding that engineers who are building products for the company are a key focus.

"When working with customers like HDFC Bank, Jio Platforms, Adani Group and Mahindra Group, one key part of collaboration is bringing together products and engineering organisations. This is showing in the business growth," he said.

Renner pointed out that a quarter of Google Cloud's developers sit in India. On GitHub, the world’s largest developer community, India has 15.4 million developers, second only to the US, which has 20 million.

The development comes at a time when Google Cloud is looking to onboard new partners and businesses as generative AI (GenAI) sees rapid adoption. Last month, Google Cloud and telecom giant Bharti Airtel inked a “long-term” partnership to deliver cloud solutions to Indian businesses.

Prior to that in May itself, homegrown GenAI startup Soket AI Labs also launched India’s first open-source multilingual foundational model called Pragna-1B in partnership with Google Cloud.

In February, the tech giant Google also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Maharashtra government to drive innovative and scalable AI solutions in areas such as agriculture, healthcare, sustainability, education, and startups.

Google stands as one of the top contenders in the cloud market, trailing behind Amazon and Microsoft. However, the company’s cloud division has shown consistent growth in both revenue and profit in recent years.

Google Cloud turned profitable in the initial quarter of 2023, and within a year, in the first quarter of 2024, its operating income skyrocketed to USD 900 million, marking a more than fourfold increase from the previous year.

Article Source – The Economic Times, Google Cloud