The top announcements for startups from Google I/O ‘26

Many of the world’s fastest-growing AI startups are choosing to build their future — and the world’s — on Google Cloud because of our complete and open AI stack. We embed AI into every layer of our architecture so your team is fully equipped to build and scale for the agentic era. 

At Google Cloud Next ‘26, we focused on providing updates to each layer of the stack to help lean teams move faster and operate more efficiently. We introduced a unified Agent Platform that moves beyond isolated AI tools to a complete lifecycle platform and a new generation of TPUs optimized for both training and inference. This was complemented by the world’s first Agentic Data Cloud, a system designed to take on the shift from human scale to agent scale and updates to our AI-powered cybersecurity platform, now combining Google’s Threat Intelligence and Security Operations with Wiz’s Cloud and AI Security Platform to prevent, detect, and respond to threats in the agentic era. 

A diverse set of global startups are already putting this stack to work. For example, Photoroom relies on our highly optimized compute to process over 1,000 images per minute. In the enterprise customer engagement space, Satisfi Labs leverages Gemini, BigQuery, and AlloyDB to deliver intelligent interactions and real-time insights to 800 sports, entertainment, and tourism clients. Meanwhile, global collaboration platform Notion is at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence into productivity tools, and Mantis AI operates high-throughput inference pipelines to deliver video-native intelligence to major broadcasters. 

Now, at Google I/O ‘26, we are expanding on that foundation by introducing more cost-effective frontier models and bringing these agentic capabilities directly into your development workflow. We are bridging the gap between local prototyping and cloud scale, giving your team a straightforward path to build, test, and distribute your applications.

Let’s look at the key announcements for startups from Google I/O and how you can apply them to your business.

1. Smarter, faster models

Models continue to be the foundation of what many startups are building with Google Cloud, so we’re excited to have evolved them once again. This new generation of models deliver maximum intelligence with incredible efficiency.

• Gemini 3.5 Flash delivers intelligence that rivals large flagship models at Flash speed. It’s our strongest agentic and coding model yet, ideal for tackling long-horizon agentic tasks, often at less than half the cost of comparable models.

• Gemini 3.5 Pro (pre-announcement): We announced our flagship reasoning model officially rolls out next month.

• Gemini Omni is a groundbreaking new model that produces dynamic video content by blending text, audio, image, and video inputs. Gemini Omni delivers a highly intuitive approach to video creation and editing — whether you are developing interactive virtual try-ons for e-commerce, streamlining complex post-production workflows, or generating tailored video narratives, Gemini Omni unlocks new ways to create content and drive deeper customer engagement.

What it means for startups: You now have direct access to build with new state-of-the-art models from DeepMind. We are continuing to push the boundaries of what AI can do, ensuring that as we pioneer new frontiers, we simultaneously deliver the speed and cost-efficiencies your startup needs to scale.

2. AI that works for you

At Next ‘26, we introduced purpose-built agents to handle the heavy lifting at every layer of the stack — from threat-hunting SecOps agents and modular data agents, to self-driving cloud infrastructure that autonomously fixes misconfigurations. 

But that massive, specialized agentic power needs a coordinator. Enter Google Antigravity — the ultimate control plane. These new updates transform how applications are built, deployed, and managed.

• Antigravity 2.0: A dedicated, standalone desktop application for Mac, Windows, and Linux. This acts as an "agent-first" workspace to build, test, and orchestrate complex AI workflows without being tied down to a traditional code editor (IDE).

• Antigravity CLI & SDK: For developers who want to stay at the keyboard, the blazing-fast and stack-agnostic command-line interface lets you run and monitor agents seamlessly. Meanwhile, the Python SDK opens up Google's internal agent infrastructure, allowing you to code and control stable agent loops programmatically.

• Dynamic subagents: This allows a primary AI agent to automatically spawn smaller, specialized child agents to handle focused subtasks. It unlocks massive parallel engineering output — your main local agent can delegate a database query to a Cloud Data Agent, for example, or spin up a local code-review subagent, all without cluttering its main memory space.

• Scheduled tasks: Remove manual maintenance chores by setting background timers and cron schedules. Startups can instruct Antigravity to trigger your cloud-based observability agents or run local repository sanity checks every night at midnight — completely autonomously.

• Enterprise-grade security: Antigravity connects local desktop and terminal agent loops directly to your private Google Cloud projects. By inheriting Google Cloud’s standard data privacy protections and Terms of Service, this ensures your customer data is in your control and agent activity runs within your secure cloud boundary by default.

What it means for startups: You no longer just have a coding assistant; you have an entire fleet of specialized AI engineers at your fingertips. By combining the purpose-built cloud agents launched at Next with the Antigravity control plane, a lean team can orchestrate data pipelines, manage security, and execute massive parallel coding tasks — all from a single, secure environment.

3. More ways to accelerate development

We are streamlining the developer workflow to help you move from a prompt to a production-ready application with far less friction. This year’s updates focus on removing the infrastructure setup that traditionally slows teams down.

• Native Android support in AI Studio: You can now go directly from a natural language prompt to a fully native Android app within the browser. This includes support for the Google Play Console, allowing developers to publish apps directly to the test track without managing local SDK environments.

• The seamless handoff: Through a new integration, you can export entire projects from Google AI Studio directly to your local Antigravity environment with a single click. This transfers your complete codebase, files, and conversation context so you can transition from web prototyping to local development without losing your place.

• Managed agents: For lean startup teams, building a production-grade agent shouldn't require managing complex infrastructure. Available across both the Gemini API and Google Cloud's Agent Platform, the new Managed Agents API acts as an agent-as-a-service so you can "manage the mission, not the machine." Simply define your instructions and tools, and a single API call will spin up your agent within a secure, ephemeral Google Cloud sandbox. This allows your team to offload the heavy lifting of backend maintenance and focus entirely on building great agentic experiences

What it means for startups: We are providing a straightforward path from prototype to production. You can quickly test app concepts in the browser, move them to a local workspace for deep orchestration, and deploy user-facing agents using managed cloud infrastructure — saving your engineering team weeks of setup and maintenance.

4. A boost for your personal productivity

While your engineers are accelerating product development, we also want to help founders and operators manage the daily noise of running a company.

To help with this, we are introducing Gemini Spark — a new 24/7 personal AI agent that works in the background across Google Workspace and other daily tools. Instead of just answering questions, it can autonomously execute multi-step workflows on your behalf. 

For example, Spark can identify a critical product delay, cross-reference your team's documents to recalculate the timeline, update internal tracking sheets, and draft an update email to your investors — all while waiting for your explicit approval before executing.

What it means for startups: While Antigravity builds your product, Spark acts as your digital chief of staff. It handles the routine, manual operational processes so you can stay focused on high-impact, strategic innovation.

Start building today: The Google for Startups AI Agents Challenge

Open globally to eligible startup founders and developers, this competition equips your team with $500 in cloud credits and access to our new Agent Platform, so you can build autonomous agents and compete for a share of a $90,000 prize pool.

We’re offering separate tracks, whether you want to build a net-new agent from scratch, optimize an existing prototype for production, or prep a business-ready agent for enterprise distribution, there is a track tailored to your exact stage. Submissions are open until June 5, 2026, and will be evaluated on technical implementation, business case, innovation, and your final demo. Learn more and sign up for the challenge here.