At I/O Connect India 2025, Google Doubles Down on AI and Startup Growth

At Google I/O Connect India 2025 held in Bengaluru, Google announced new initiatives and AI capabilities to support the Indian developer and startup ecosystem in leading India’s AI-powered ambition. Google’s announcements emphasized the company’s lasting commitment to Indian developers’ success, and include localizing data processing of its high-performance thinking model Gemini 2.5 Flash, new Agentic AI tools in Firebase Studio, a new training program with one of the world’s leading gaming engine platform – Unity, and collaborations with 3 India AI Mission startups in building innovative solutions toward the development of India’s Make-in-India AI models.

The company also highlighted that, based on third-party evaluations, the Google Play and Android ecosystem generated INR 4 lakh crore in revenue for app publishers and the wider economy in India in 2024, and supported the creation of 35 lakh direct, indirect, and spillover jobs in India.

Dr. Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind, who opened the event, said, “Indian developers are literally writing the next chapter of India’s success story, using AI capabilities to build real-world applications that are reaching millions of businesses and people across India and the world. We have been inspired by their solutions, and proud that many have chosen our AI, including Gemini, Gemma and GenMedia models like Veo and Imagen, to build their innovations. As we have done today, we remain steadfast in bringing them our industry-leading, cutting-edge capabilities to accelerate their journeys, and India’s leadership in a global AI-led future.”

Preeti Lobana, Country Manager, Google India who held a fireside chat with Subrata Mitra, Partner, Accel on building enduring AI-driven companies during the event’s opening keynote stated: “There's a buzz about the 'India Opportunity' driven by an ambitious national vision. Google is deeply committed to leveraging this unique foundation. India’s developers are shaping how the world will use AI, and we're proud to stand with them. We're giving India the best tools, the most open platforms, and the strongest support to build boldly for the world, fostering a profound 'AI Productivity Leap' across businesses and startups.”

Bringing Cutting-Edge AI to Power Indian Innovation

The availability of Gemini 2.5 Flash processing in India is a significant step by the company to further enable Indian developers with powerful, localized AI capabilities. This is aimed at enabling top-tier stability and speed for developers, especially in building for regulated industries like healthcare, banking and finance, and for the public sector, where data residency and low-latency processing are crucial. 

The company’s Gemma models are also contributing to India’s AI ambition. Sarvam, Soket AI and Gnani, which have been selected by the India AI Mission, are building the next generation of Make in India AI models based on Gemma. Google has been closely collaborating with Sarvam, which built the recently-released Sarvam-Translate model for long-form text translation using Gemma. 

Google is also closely partnering with BharatGen at IIT Bombay to build indigenous Indic language Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models that will aim to make Gemma more helpful in the Indic context, especially for historically underrepresented languages and governance applications.

Google announced measures that will be especially helpful for developers building for India’s booming mobile commerce sector. It is expanding the availability of fresh and accurate information in Google Maps comprising over 250 million places worldwide, enabling developers to build better generative AI features. New India-specific pricing for the Google Maps Places UI Kit will help developers build easy-to-use widgets and components with the best of Google Maps Places for a fraction of the cost, while expansion of AI-powered summaries in the Places API to India will enable developers to create highly informative and engaging location-based services that save users time and resonate with local needs.

Growing the Helpfulness of Agentic AI for India’s Developers

To its recently-announced Cloud-based agentic AI workspace, Firebase Studio, which helps create full-stack AI applications with single prompts, Google is bringing several new agentic tools and capabilities. Optimized AI templates in Firebase Studio bring the power of Agent Mode to help developers generate and build beautiful and powerful apps on a variety of development frameworks. Other new features, like forking workspaces and integrating Firebase backend services and deploying to Firebase Hosting, are aimed at empowering developers to collaborate, build and deploy their apps swiftly, and at no initial cost.

Opening India’s Developer Ecosystem to New Avenues for Growth

The Indian ecosystem comprises the second largest number of active developers on Google Play across the world, contributing over 10 lakh developer jobs in 2024. 

Building compelling offerings on Android, this ecosystem has played an important role in shaping the impact and inclusiveness of India’s digital economy. Approximately 72% of surveyed Indian users claimed their first access to the internet was on an Android device, about 85% say their Android phone is one of the main ways they access digital public services, and 69% report first using AI through an app on their Android device. Device makers have also been able to make devices affordable due to the open-source nature of Android, which has assisted estimated savings of INR 25,200 crore in development and operating costs.

In an effort to help this ecosystem unlock the potential of new avenues of growth, Google has launched ‘Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training’, a free, immersive, and globally-recognized training and certification program for aspiring and professional game developers in India. Developed in collaboration with Unity, the globally-leading 3D game development company behind popular titles like Free Fire and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and the Game Developer Association of India (GDAI), the program will guide participants through more than 30 hours of comprehensive online training across three specialized learning tracks - Game Developer, Artist, and Programmer. In India, the program is being offered initially to 500 developers, in partnership with the Governments of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and GDAI, with wider availability and expansion being explored.

Google is also hosting the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon, which will enable developers to apply their industry-leading AI knowledge and skills to practical use, to innovate, and build solutions.

Google I/O Connect India 2025 gave the approximate 1,800 attending developers an engaging experience filled with insightful conversations and live demonstrations of Google’s new product innovations for developers. Additionally, eight of India’s leading startups - Sarvam, CoRover, InVideo, Glance, Dashverse, ToonSutra, Entri and Nykaa - showcased their solutions built with Google’s powerful AI models, facilitating real-world impact across sectors.