The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next.
During its Cloud Next conference this week, Google Cloud unveiled an extensive list of prominent artificial intelligence startups that have become its clients.
At the recent Google Cloud Next conference held in Las Vegas, the company unveiled a series of innovative features, including its new artificial intelligence processing chip named Ironwood and its latest AI model, Gemini 2.5 Flash. Additionally, it announced an extensive list of AI startups that have chosen to utilize its cloud infrastructure. Among these startups are some of the most well-known globally.
One of the standout companies on this list is Safe Superintelligence (SSI), founded by one of the co-founders of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever. There's also Anysphere, which develops the popular AI-powered code editor, Cursor, which uses Anthropic’s Claude models on Google Cloud. It has been reported that Cursor was recently valued at $10 billion. Its main competitor is GitHub CoPilot, making Microsoft one of its closest rivals.
Hebbia, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze large documents and answer questions, has gained popularity in the legal sector and has received significant funding in its Series B round, totaling $130 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and Peter Thiel. According to Google, this company is also implementing the Gemini models.
Meanwhile, Magic focuses on creating advanced models to automate coding and research, and its choice of Google Cloud is evident since, in its $320 million funding round in 2024, it received investments from CapitalG of Alphabet and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Google Cloud also provides access to GPUs.
Physical Intelligence is focused on developing core software for robots and boasts a prominent list of co-founders, including investor Lachy Groom. It recently raised $400 million at a pre-money valuation of $2 billion, backed by investors such as Sequoia, Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital, and Thrive Capital, with several of its founders having worked at Google DeepMind.
Photoroom, one of the most promising AI startups in Paris, specializes in photo editing using Google Cloud's Veo 2 and Imagen 3 models. Synthesia, on the other hand, works on products that generate highly realistic AI avatars, recently raising $180 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion, with NEA and Google Ventures among its investors.
In summary, Google Cloud is building an impressive list of startups that will allow it to compete with Microsoft Azure and, to a lesser extent, AWS in the realm of artificial intelligence workloads. Furthermore, Google announced the inclusion of Lightspeed as a venture capital partner, joining Sequoia and Y Combinator. The portfolio companies of its partner investors have access to its AI chips and models, and Lightspeed’s portfolio companies may qualify for $150,000 in cloud credits.
The additional list of AI startups presented by Google includes: Augment Code (coding agent), Autoscience (scientific research agents), Big Sur AI (personalized recommendations), Captions (video creator and editor with voice), Eon.io (autonomous business backup and recovery), fal is (text-to-image and image-to-video), Spot AI (AI for security cameras), Story (blockchain for intellectual property storage and licensing), StudyHall AI (reading and writing coaching), Ubie (health symptom analyzer in Japan), Udio (music creation), Ufonia (agent for clinical queries), and Wagestream (financial wellness platform), among others.
