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Google held its Google Cloud Next Conference in Las Vegas, this week. It announced dozens new features, such as its next-generation AI processing chip called Ironwood and its latest AI model Gemini 2.5 Flash.
The company also announced that a number of AI startups have signed up to use the cloud. Some of the most popular startups in the world are among them. Safe Superintelligence (SSI), founded by former chief scientist Ilya Suksever, co-founder of OpenAI and former co-founder of the company, is also on this list.
Also included are:
The AI-powered code editor Cursor, as well asAnysphere. Google claims Cursor uses Anthropic’s Claude model on Google Cloud. Sources have told TechCrunch that Cursor’s recent valuation was $10 billion. Microsoft is one of its biggest competitors, as GitHub CoPilot is probably its biggest rival. Hebbia
uses AI to search and answer questions in large documents, which has made the product a hit with the legal industry. Andreessen Horowitz was the lead investor, while Index Ventures and Google Ventures participated in its $130 Million Series B. Google claims that it is using Google’s Gemini model.
The Magic builds frontier models for automating coding and research. Its choice of Google Cloud was probably obvious, considering that Alphabet CapitalG and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt were investors in its $320 million fundraising round for 2024. Google says it’s using Google Cloud to power GPUs.
Physical Intelligence works on developing foundational robot software and has an impressive list of co-founders including solo investor extraordinaire Lachy Groom. It raised $400 million in November at a pre-money valuation of $2 billion from investors including Sequoia Capital, Jeff Bezos and Lux Capital. Some of its founders, such as Karol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, and others, have strong ties to Google. They worked at Google DeepMind.
Photoroom is one of Europe’s most popular AI startups. It offers AI photo-editing and uses Google Cloud’s Veo 2 model for video-generating and its text-to image model Imagen 3 to do so.
Synthesia ( ) is building products to create highly realistic AI avatars, and uses various Google models. It raised $180m at a $2.1billion round in January, led by NEA with GV (formerly Google Ventures) as one of the investors.
Google Cloud has a long list of startups that it is acquiring to help it compete with Microsoft Azure and AWS for AI workloads.
Google also announced that Lightspeed was added to its VC partners
along with Sequoia, Y Combinator and other VCs. Google Cloud gives portfolio companies of its partner investors access its AI chips and models. Google announced that Lightspeed’s AI portfolio firms can qualify for $150,000 cloud credits. It has plans to convince more rising star startups join its cloud. The rest of the AI startups Google showcased were:
Augment Code- AI software coding agents
- Autoscience – scientific research AI agents,
- Big on ai, – personalized recommendations for ecommerce
- Big on ai, – talking video creators and video editors
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