Google Cloud on June 1 announced an expanded partnership with Vietnam’s National Innovation Center (NIC), the Startup and Innovation Hub of Ho Chi Minh City (SIHUB), Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG), and Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi).
This partnership establishes an AI startup innovation corridor in Southeast Asia, and from the region to Silicon Valley.
The cross border initiative empowers founders to develop and commercialize proprietary agentic AI products while expanding their pathway to scale internationally.
Since 2018, such accelerators have helped more than 200 early stage startups in Southeast Asia build new products, raise $6.6 billion in funding, and create 11,300 jobs. Many of these companies have expanded internationally or become prominent names in fintech, digital health, logistics, edtech, and artificial intelligence.
In Vietnam, startups such as Thuocsi (also known as Buymed), TopCV, Vbee, BenKon, Reforged Labs, and GIMO have all participated in Google’s support programs.
According to Mr. Marc Woo, Managing Director of Google Vietnam, Google for Startups programs have enabled more than 500 Vietnamese startups to achieve commercial scale over the past four years. "We see this impact in graduates like BenKon and Vbee, whose AI products are benefiting numerous B2B customers across industries; Buymed, which grew from a local marketplace into a regional HealthTech leader; Reforged Labs, which pivoted to establish itself as a global category leader in AI driven creative intelligence; and GIMO and TopCV, which are actively supporting national digital transformation initiatives," Mr. Marc Woo stated.
He added that continued collaborations with NIC and SIHUB will connect even more Vietnamese founders with the industry’s only fully integrated AI stack, best in class engineering advisory, and global tech hubs, thereby empowering them to build, commercialize, and scale frontier solutions.
Direct connection to the Sillicon Valley ecosystem
Mr. Sami Kizilbash, Head of Asia-Pacific Developer Ecosystem at Google Cloud, noted that the new program will support AI startups from seed stage to Series B across six Southeast Asian countries. It will also leverage public-private partnership models to drive the growth of the regional AI ecosystem. "We aim to build communities of practice, helping Southeast Asian markets become trusted hubs for proven AI solutions that generate tangible economic and social impacts," Mr. Sami Kizilbash emphasized.
A key highlight of the program is the establishment of a direct bridge between Southeast Asian startups and the technology and investment ecosystem in Silicon Valley.
Accordingly, participating startups will have the opportunity to join an immersive, in person California residency. This includes technical deep dives at leading technology hubs, including Google’s Mountain View and San Francisco campuses, and direct engagement with venture capital clusters along Sand Hill Road and Palo Alto. This immersion is designed to help startups stress test and optimize their products against global benchmarks while cultivating the connections crucial for international scale.
The inaugural cohort of 25 startups is scheduled to join the equity free, three month Google for Startups Accelerator: Southeast Asia program commencing in August 2026. In addition to international networking opportunities, participating startups will gain access to Google Cloud’s full stack AI capabilities, including Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Agentic Data Cloud, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and Google Antigravity.
Through the Google for Startups Cloud Program, eligible startups can receive up to $350,000 in cloud credits for end to end training, fine tuning, and serving of secure and grounded AI agents.
Furthermore, businesses will be enrolled in Trusted Tester and Early Access programs, allowing them to build using Google’s next generation AI models, including its latest Gemini 3.5 models, and receive high touch engineering advisory from Google Cloud’s engineering center and Google DeepMind’s AI research lab in Singapore.
Vietnam remains designated as an emerging AI hub
Training and technical upskilling will also be deployed across multiple regional innovation hubs, including hands on bootcamps at NIC’s Hoa Lac facility and Hanoi branch, SIHUB headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City, and Garuda Spark Innovation Hub (GSIH) in Indonesia.
Mr. Vu Quoc Huy, Director, Vietnam National Innovation Center, assessed that the program serves as a bridge between cutting edge tech startups in priority sectors and partners in Singapore and Silicon Valley, while facilitating collaboration in advanced fields like agentic AI and embodied AI in enterprises and industrial manufacturing.
Meanwhile, Ms. Dang Thị Luan, Director, Startup and Innovation Hub of Ho Chi Minh City, stated that this initiative creates a two way corridor: a conduit for high potential Vietnamese AI startups to scale internationally, and a trusted gateway for their regional peers to enter the vibrant local market.
According to the participating partners, the formation of a cross border AI collaboration network is expected to help position Southeast Asia as a trusted destination for proven AI solutions, while enhancing the global competitiveness and market productivity of the region's tech enterprises.
Google translate