The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next 2026
This week, Google Cloud Next 2026 brought together tech leaders and startups in Las Vegas, highlighting Google’s strategic push to attract AI-focused startups to its cloud platform. The company announced a substantial $750 million fund to help cloud partners—ranging from early-stage ventures to consulting giants—sell more AI-powered agents to enterprise clients. This funding can be used for proof-of-concept projects using Gemini models, deployment support, cloud credits, and rebates.
Breakout Startups on Google Cloud
Google highlighted several innovative startups expanding their use of Google Cloud:
- Lovable: Rapidly growing in the “vibe-coding” space, Lovable is launching a new coding agent through Google’s app marketplace, boasting a remarkable $400 million ARR as of early 2026.
- Notion: Popular for its AI-powered document productivity features, Notion leverages Google Gemini to enhance text and image generation and has been valued at around $11 billion.
- Gamma: Positioning itself as a powerful alternative to PowerPoint, Gamma is using Google’s Nano Banana 2 image model and has reached a $2.1 billion valuation.
- Inferact: This commercial inference startup, known for the open source project vLLM, accesses Nvidia GPUs and Google’s full AI stack via Google Cloud.
- ComfyUI: An open source tool for AI image and multimedia generation, also utilizing Nano Banana 2 and other Google Cloud technologies.
Other Promising Startups Cited
- Chorus (real-time goods tracking with AI)
- Emergent AI (vibe-coding)
- ExaCare AI (post-acute care solutions)
- Insilica (AI for chemical safety reports)
- Parallel (AI-ready web and research APIs)
- Proximal Health (claims automation)
- Reducto (AI document parsing)
- Stord (e-commerce fulfillment)
- Stylitics (retail AI image generation)
- Temporal (developer cloud environments)
- Vapi (voice agent dev tools)
- Vurvey Labs (synthetic market research)
- Wand (in-game AI assistants for PC)
- Watershed (enterprise sustainability reporting)
- ZenBusiness (SMB back-office AI tools)
This year’s event showcased the breadth of AI innovation taking place on Google Cloud and underlined Google’s growing influence in the burgeoning AI startup landscape.
For more details, see the original article by Julie Bort at TechCrunch.
