Tag Archives: Google for Startups Accelerator

How recommerce startup Beni uses AI to help you shop secondhand

Posted by Lillian Chen – Global Brand and Content Marketing Manager, Google Accelerator Programs

Sarah Pinner’s passion to reduce waste began as a child when she would reach over and turn off her sibling’s water when they were brushing their teeth. This passion has fueled her throughout her career, from joining zero-waste grocery startup Imperfect Foods to co-founding Beni, an AI-powered browser extension that aggregates and recommends resale options while users shop their favorite brands. Together with her co-founder and Beni CTO Celine Lightfoot, Sarah built Beni to make online apparel resale accessible to everyday shoppers in order to accelerate the circular economy and reduce the burden of fashion on the planet.

Sarah explains how the platform helps connect shoppers to secondhand clothing: “Let’s say you’re looking at a Nike shoe. While on the Nike site, Beni pulls resale listings for that same shoe from over 40 marketplaces like Poshmark or Ebay or TheRealReal. Users can simply buy the resale version instead of new to save money and purchase more sustainably. On average, Beni users save about 55% from the new item, and it’s also a lot more sustainable to buy the item secondhand.”

Beni was one of the first companies in the recommerce platform software space, and the competitive landscape is growing. “The more recommerce platforms the better, but Beni is ahead in terms of our partnerships and access to data as well as the ability to search across data,” says Sarah.


How Beni Uses AI

AI helps Beni to ingest all data feeds from their 40+ partnerships into Beni’s database so they can surface the most relevant resale items to the shopper. For example, when Beni receives eBay’s feed for a product search, there may be 100,000 different sizes. The team has trained the Beni model to normalize sizing data. That’s one piece of their categorization.

“When we first started Beni, the intention wasn’t to start a company. It was to solve a problem, and AI has been a great tool to be able to do that,” says Sarah.


Participating in Google for Startups Accelerator: Circular Economy

Beni’s product was built using Google technology, is hosted on Google Cloud and utilizes Vision API Product Search, Vertex AI, BigQuery, and the Chrome web store.

When they heard about the Google for Startups Accelerator: Circular Economy program, it seemed like the perfect fit. “Having been in the circular economy space, and being a software business already using a plethora of Google products, and having a Google Chrome extension - getting plugged into the Google world gave us great insights about very niche questions that are very hard to find online,” says Sarah.

As an affiliate business in resale, Beni’s revenue per transaction is low—a challenge for a business model that requires scale. The Beni team worked one-on-one with Google mentors to best use Google tools in a cost-effective way. Keeping search results relevant is a core piece of the zero-waste model. “Being plugged in and being able to work through ways to improve that relevancy and that reliability with the people in Google who know how to build Google Chrome extensions, know how to use the AI tools on the backend, and deeply understand Search is super helpful.” The Google for Startups Accelerator: Circular Economy program also educated the team in how to selectively use AI tools such as Google’s Vision API Product Search versus building their own tech in-house.

“Having direct access to people at Google was really key for our development and sophisticated use of Google tools. And being a part of a cohort of other circular economy businesses was phenomenal for building connections in the same space,” says Sarah.

Google for Startups Accelerator support extended beyond tech. A program highlight for Sarah was a UX writing deep dive specifically for sustainability. “It showed us all this amazing, tangible research that Google has done about what is actually effective in terms of communicating around sustainability to drive behavior change,” said Sarah. “You can’t shame people into doing things. The way in which you communicate is really important in terms of if people will actually make a change or be receptive.”

Additionally, the new connections made with other circular economy startups and experts in their space was a huge benefit of participating in Google for Startups Accelerator. Mentorship, in particular, provided product-changing value. Google technical mentors shared advice that had a huge impact on the decision for Beni to move from utilizing Vision API Product Search to their own reverse image search. “Our mentors guided us to shift a core part of our technology. It was a big decision and was one of the biggest pieces of mentorship that helped drive us forward. This was a prime example of how the Google for Startups Accelerator program is truly here to support us in building the best products,” says Sarah.


What’s next for Beni

Beni’s mission is straightforward ‐ they’re easing the burden for shoppers to find and buy items second hand so that they can bring new people into resale and make resale the new norm.

Additionally, Beni is continuing to be built into a search platform, searching across second hand clothing. Beni offers their Chrome extension on desktop and mobile, and they will have a searchable interface. In addition to building out the platform further, Beni is looking at how they can support other e-commerce platforms and integrate resale into their offerings.

Learn about how to get involved in Google accelerator programs here.

Announcing the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program, Europe & Israel – applications now open.

Posted by Karina Govindji Senior Director – LEAD - Global Workforce Diversity, and Noa Havazelet – Head of Google's accelerator programs across Europe and Israel

Applications are also open for underrepresented founders in North America

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of transformative technologies, reshaping industries and redefining the way we live and work. Yet, a closer look at the AI startup ecosystem reveals a stark gender disparity. Women, despite their profound capabilities and innovative prowess, often find themselves navigating a maze of obstacles in their entrepreneurial journey. Despite investment in AI software is booming globally, the venture capital funding problem for women is even more marked. Women-founded startups accounted for only 2.1% of VC deals involving AI startups1. This is a reality that demands attention and action. Globally in 2023, all-women founding teams raised just 3% of all dollars invested in the year, with mixed gender founding teams taking 15%, leaving 82% of dollars to flow to founding teams that are all men2.

Google's accelerator programs have actively taken a leading role in championing diversity and empowering women and minority founders - having supported 1100+ startups across the globe since 2016, 36% of which are women-led startups. As such, we are pleased to announce the launch of the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program (Europe & Israel), a 12 week program for Seed to Series A AI startups based in Europe and Israel.

The Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program (Europe & Israel) provides a comprehensive mix of mentorship, technical support, and workshops, establishing a robust foundation for participants. Beyond Google's expert guidance, the accelerator cultivates a collaborative network among women founders, propelling innovation within the tech startup space. By empowering women founders, the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program (Europe & Israel) proactively contributes to creating a more inclusive and equitable tech community.

Applications for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders Europe & Israel program are open until January 19th, 2024. You can learn more and apply here.

In a similar vein, in North America, two other Google for Startups Accelerator programs for underrepresented founders have opened applications for the fifth Women Founders and Black Founders programs. These 10 week equity- free programs are best suited for Seed to Series A, high potential revenue generative women-led and black-led startups with growing teams (5+ employees). Applications for both programs close on February 1st, 2024.

To further explore these opportunities and why you should apply - listen to what past participants of the North American Women Founder and Black Founder programs have to say here.



Welcoming our inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud North America cohort

Posted by Ashley Francisco Head of Startup Ecosystem, North America, Google & Darren Mowry, Managing Director, Corporate Sales, Google

We’re kicking off a summer of accelerators by welcoming the inaugural 2023 North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud cohort, our new class of cloud-native startups in the United States and Canada.

This 10-week virtual accelerator brings the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’re excited to offer these startups cloud mentorship and technical project support, along with deep dives and workshops on product design, customer acquisition and leadership development for technology startup founders and leaders.

We heard from some of the founders from this year’s cohort - including New York City-based Harmonic Discovery, Toronto-based Oncoustics, and Vancouver-based OneCup AI - demonstrating how they are using Google Cloud data, analytics, AI, and other technologies across healthcare, agriculture and farming, and more. Read more on their aspirations for the program below:


"The team at Harmonic Discovery is excited to scale our deep learning infrastructure for drug discovery using Google Cloud. We also want to learn best practices from the Google team on training and developing machine learning models in a cost effective way.” – Rayees Rahman CEO, Harmonic Discovery


"We're very excited to grow our presence in the healthcare space by bringing our ultrasound based "virtual biopsy" solutions to clinics and serve over 2B people with liver diseases globally. Specifically in the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud program, we're looking to develop and hone our ability to efficiently scale our ML environments and processes to support the development of multiple new diagnostic products in parallel. We're also very excited about creating an edge-cloud hybrid solution with effective distribution of AI processing across GCP and Pixel 7 Pro.” – Beth Rogozinski CEO, Oncoustics


"Our primary objective is to leverage Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) cutting-edge technologies to enhance BETSY, our computer vision AI for animal care. Our milestones include developing advanced image recognition models and achieving real-time processing speeds for large-scale datasets. The accelerator will play a vital role in helping us refine our algorithms and optimize our infrastructure on GCP.” – Mokah Shmigelsly, Co-Founder & CEO and Geoffrey Shmigelsky, Co-Founder & CTO, OneCup AI


We received so many great applications for this program and we're excited to welcome the 12 startups that make up the the inaugural North American Cloud cohort:

  • Aiden Automotive (San Ramon, CA): Aiden is one of the first software solutions to provide streaming two-way communication directly with the vehicle and across vehicle brands. Aiden provides simple and intuitive 100% GDPR and CCPA compliant consent management, enabling car owners to choose which digital services they desire.
  • Binarly (Santa Monica, CA): Binarly’s agentless, enterprise-class AI-powered firmware security platform helps protect from advanced threats below the operating system. The company’s technology solves firmware supply chain security problems by identifying vulnerabilities, malicious firmware modifications and providing firmware SBOM visibility without access to the source code. Binarly’s cloud-agnostic solutions give enterprise security teams actionable insights, and reduce the cost and time to respond to security incidents.
  • Duality.ai (San Mateo, CA): Duality AI is an augmented digital twin platform that provides end-to-end workflows for predictive simulation and high fidelity visualization. The platform helps close data gaps for machine learning teams working on perception problems and helps robotics teams speed up design and validation of their autonomy software.
  • HalloAI (Provo, UT): Hallo is an AI-powered language learning platform for speaking. Press a button and start speaking any language with an AI teacher in 3 seconds.
  • Harmonic Discovery (New York, NY): Harmonic Discovery uses machine learning to design multi-targeted kinase drugs for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
  • MLtwist (Santa Clara, CA): MLtwist helps companies bring AI to the world faster. It gives data scientists and ML engineers access to the easiest and best way to get out of the weeds of data pipelines and back to what they enjoy and do best – design, build, and deploy AI.
  • Oncoustics (Toronto, ON): Oncoustics is creating advanced solutions for low-cost and non-invasive surveillance, diagnostics, and treatment monitoring of diseases with high unmet clinical need through the use of patented AI-based solutions running on ultrasound scans. Using a handheld point of care ultrasound, Oncoustics’ first solution allows clinicians to obtain a liver health assessment within 5 minutes.
  • OneCup AI (Vancouver, BC): OneCup uses Computer vision for Animal Care. Our AI, BETSY, is the eyes of the rancher when the rancher is away.
  • Passio AI (Menlo Park, CA): Passio AI is a mobile AI platform that helps developers and companies build mobile applications powered by expert-level AI and computer vision.
  • RealKey (San Francisco, CA): RealKey is one of the first collaboration platforms built specifically for finance (starting with mortgages), automating documentation collection/review, tasks, and communication for all parties (not just borrowers) involved in transactions to reduce time, effort, and costs to close.
  • Sevco Security Inc. (Austin, TX): Sevco Security a leading IT asset visibility and cybersecurity company, that provides the industry’s first unified asset intelligence platform designed to address the new extended attack surface and create a trusted data repository of all devices, users and applications an organization uses.
  • VESSL AI (San Jose, CA): VESSL is an end-to-end MLOps platform aiming to be the next Snowflake for AI. The platform enables MLEs to run ML workloads at any scale on any cloud, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, and on-premises.

As tech advancements continue at lightning speed, it’s an exciting opportunity to work with these founders and startup teams to help grow and scale their business. Programming for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud begins mid-July and we can’t wait to see how far these startups go!

Apply now: Google for Startups Accelerator launches applications for 4th Annual Women Founders and Black Founders cohorts

Posted by Iran Karimian, Startup Ecosystem Lead, Canada & Matt Ridenour, Head of Startup Ecosystem, U.S.

Applications for the 2023 Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders and Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders are now open. Check out what our alumni founders had to say about past programs:

As tech entrepreneurs continue to drive innovation with fresh ideas and new applications of AI and machine-learning technologies, it’s an exciting time for the tech startup ecosystem. But the headwinds of the 2022 investment climate have created a steep uphill climb for founders looking for funding, and underrepresented founders continue to face even greater structural barriers to getting their businesses off the ground.

While the recent economic downturn has impacted startups across the board, it has disproportionately affected startups helmed by women and Black founders, with women-founded startups receiving only ~2.1% of total U.S. VC funding, and Black-founded startups receiving only ~1.1% of U.S. VC funding in 2022.

Google for Startups is committed to leveling the playing field for all founders, and today we’re excited to open applications for our 2023 Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders and Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders cohorts. We’ll select twelve startups across North America to participate in each program. These virtual accelerator programs are equity-free, three-month intensive bootcamps, giving founders the tools they need to prepare for the next phase of their growth journey.

Participating startups will receive mentorship and technical project support, as well as workshops focused on product design, customer acquisition, and leadership development. In addition to guidance from leaders and experts across Google product areas, each accelerator offers a cohort of peers building high potential startups who support one another with shared learnings, insights and opportunities.

We hope that these accelerator programs contribute to the ongoing effort in creating a more inclusive and equitable tech startup ecosystem for underrepresented founders. Startups in the U.S. and Canada are encouraged to apply. For the Google for Startup Accelerator: Women Founders program, apply here by July 25 and for Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders, apply here by August 2.

Google launches inaugural North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud

Posted by Ashley Francisco, Head of Startup Developer Ecosystem, North America, & Darren Mowry, Managing Director, Corporate Sales

Startups are solving the world’s most important challenges with agility, innovative technology, and determination, and Google is proud to support them.

TL;DR: Applications are now open for the inaugural North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud cohort. Designed to help connect founders who are building with Cloud to the people, products, and best practices they need to grow, this 10-week virtual accelerator will help 8-12 startups prepare for the next phase of their growth journey.

Around the world, the cloud is helping businesses and governments accelerate their digital transformations, scale their operations, and innovate in new areas. At Google Cloud, we’re helping businesses solve some of their toughest challenges. For instance, we’ve partnered with innovative digital native companies like cart.com to democratize ecommerce by giving brands of all sizes the full capabilities needed to take on the world’s largest online retailers, and with dynamic startups like kimo.ai which leverages our AI tools to transform traditional approaches to online learning.

The adoption and acceleration of Google Cloud unlocks massive potential for startups as the global cloud market is set to grow to more than $470 billion over the next five years. With the artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) landscape evolving rapidly, this moment presents an exciting and unique opportunity for startups. The Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud program helps cloud-native startups using AI/ML to seize the opportunities ahead.

Starting today, U.S.- and Canada-based startups can apply for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud program. This equity-free, 10-week virtual accelerator will offer cloud mentorship and technical project support, as well as deep dives and workshops on product design, customer acquisition and leadership development for cloud startup founders and leaders.

The Accelerator program is designed to bring the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing impactful work in the cloud.

Here’s what our recent North American Accelerator alumni had to say:

“Thanks to truly amazing mentorship and direct access to Googlers, we have been able to reach new levels of specialized knowledge and deployment capability in our GCP architecture and artificial intelligence projects. From a technical perspective to a business growth standpoint, this is simply invaluable. What we have built in three months with Google will be a part of our upcoming next-gen product line in both Healthcare and Non-Healthcare settings. We deeply thank all Googlers for their exceptional participation in our journey." – Francois Gand, Founder and CEO, NURO

"The accelerator provided F8th Inc. with so much more than we could have ever dreamed. The meaningful mentorship relationships that have been created continue to endure, the workshops have been impactful in helping our business scale, and we have developed new business contacts both in Canada and the US. The incredible support and guidance we received has been second to none. It’s been great to have access to a multidisciplinary team and Google’s outside-the-box thinking.” — Vivene Salmon, Co-Founder, F8th Inc." – Vivene Salmon, Co-Founder, F8th Inc.

Applications are now being accepted until May 30, and the Accelerator will kick-off this July. Interested startups leveraging cloud to drive growth and innovation are encouraged to apply here.