Google is enhancing its engagement with Indian Startups. In this context, it is working with a bundle of high growth ventures as a major aspect of a worldwide program for mentorship and for enhancing its technical engagement with the winners.
Previous activities of Google for Stratups
Over the previous year, Google has been working with few of the Indian Startup such as ShareChat, social networking site, Swiggy, food delivery app, FreshMenu, UrbanClap and HealthifyMe, as a piece of its worldwide “Sand Hill” program.
Partnership with funding firms
Company is also associated with 15 top funding firms like Sequoia, Accel, Kalaari, Lightspeed Ventures, Inventus capital among others to distinguish the most blazing startups in the environment.
Which company will be selected for Sand Hill program
Managing director at Google, Rajan Anandan said that, “Sand Hill is where we partner with top VCs in the world and get them to recommend high growth companies to us… Not very early startups, but companies which have a bit of velocity are selected and offered the best of Google’s expertise”.
Selected startups will get fundings
The selected start-ups would have already received three rounds of institutional funding. After selection of startup, Google will provide mentorship for improving the product design and analytics.
How the name Sand Hill was selected for the program
The program gets its name from Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California which is striking for the grouping of funding organizations. All around, there are 150 startups that have been handpicked by the company and their VC accomplices which incorporate any semblance of Airbnb, EventBrite and Meitu.
About mentorship program after selection of winner
Founder of Freshmenu, Rashmi Daga said that, “They offer mentorship and support across all Google products from Google AdWords, analytics, maps, Android, Play etc. We were able to talk to an Android expert, who was so great that in half an hour, we got a long list of recommendations on how to improve our app. We even spoke to a machine learning (ML) expert who advised us on how to set up an ML architecture and use it in our platform.”
She also stated that FreshMenu can access the beta version of Google’s food discovery app Areo.
How Google has initiated to help startups
Google started its involvement in the startup environment 2 years ago after they partnered in forming Nasscom’s 10000 Startups programme.
Almost 5000 startups are working in India and India is currently at 3rd position for largest startup hub in the world.
Google often involved in other programs to help startups
Google offers several kinds of Support to the Indian Startups as well like six-month mentorship programme where companies get a cloud credits of $20000.
Additionally, its investment arm ‘Capital G’ has already put funds in five Startups of India like Cuemath, CommonFloor, #CarDekho, Freshdesk, and Practo.