Google Cloud Platform Blog: Celebrating 1 year of working with the best and brightest startups

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Celebrating 1 year of working with the best and brightest startups

Friday, September 18, 2015

Helping startups build and scale is something we are very passionate about here at Google. The Google Cloud Platform is a rapidly growing business within Google and our team is touching thousands of startups at various stages of their lifecycle. While we started this initiative a year ago focused on bringing Cloud Platform to the startup space, we have since enhanced the program to take a more holistic approach around 1:1 technical mentorship on cloud computing, and also bringing the rest of Google (Firebase, Digital Marketing, Launchpad) to provide value to our scaling startups. We believe that this approach can help meet a startups changing needs over time but we remain committed to our core philosophy - we want developers to focus on code; not worry about managing infrastructure.
We launched Google Cloud Platform for Startups a year ago and we have been truly humbled by the response. We are learning from our startups every day and we are taking these learnings back into Google to make our offerings and program even stronger.
Since our launch we have been able to work with and help amazing founders from partners like SV Angel, Greylock Partners and Y Combinator start up and launch on Google Cloud Platform while keeping their burn rates low. We also know that startups need more than just Cloud Platform so we always strive to bring the rest of Google to our companies as needed - whether it be Android, Firebase or other parts of the Google ecosystem.
This year we have been working with thousands of companies like Camio, FullStory and Celect who have been able to leverage our program to help grow their business. It’s truly inspiring to see the success of these companies within the last year. For example, Taplytics, a mobile optimization innovator, and a Y Combinator portfolio company, is building a platform that provides open access to raw mobile data. Taplytics empowers companies creating mobile apps to optimize their apps and push notifications quickly and easily. With Taplytics BigQuery, companies can answer any question about how people are using their mobile apps, and improve how they target and engage them. Aaron Glazer, the CEO at Taplytics saw Google Cloud Platform for Startups as a program to help them scale. “The Google Cloud Platform Startup Program has allowed our team to spend more time focusing on building a rock solid mobile A/B testing, analytics & push notification platform. The startup program has been an invaluable resource for accelerating our growth. By leveraging the expertise of the Google team along with having access to fast, agile cloud products, we have been able to create a product that will infinitely scale as we grow."
Descartes Labs, a Crosslink Capital company who is performing deep learning and AI on images to extract information requires a massive amount of compute power in large batches. They were able to get access to preemptable VM’s as a beta user and essentially harness the power of a supercomputer for some of their initial test runs. "The Google Cloud Platform for Startups program helped us get early access to Preemptible VMs which enabled us to spin up a supercomputer in the cloud for about 16 hours and processed a petabyte of satellite data for a fraction of the cost of normal cloud computing pricing. Google Cloud Platform's next generation tools allows us to focus on writing software and not on managing a huge cluster of computers" said Tim Kelton, Co-founder and Cloud Architect at Descartes Labs.
Working with and helping startups is in our DNA. We are working with a fast growing community of the best and brightest startups out there who are passionate about building what's next. If this sounds like you, come learn more at cloud.google.com/startups
The next year looks amazingly bright!
- Posted by Ken Schutt, on behalf of the VC and Startup Business Development Team, Google Cloud Platform