Have you heard of the monkey and the pedestal? Astro Teller, the head of Google’s X “moonshot factory,” likes to use this metaphor to describe tackling the biggest challenge first, despite being tempted by the endorphin boost of completing more familiar tasks.

It’s a challenge startups know well. When you're re-inventing the industry standard, it's all about failing fast. You’re looking for the quickest way to get to a “no” so you're another step closer to reaching a “yes.” Every day you gain back from abandoning trivial features in favor of focusing on the biggest challenge becomes a day closer to your goal.

Fortunately, AI is not only playing an increasing role in the offerings of startups but also how they build those offerings, accelerating their execution and giving them new insights to act faster and iterate better.

What's the fastest way you're going to get your product launched? Piecing together data across your front and back ends in yet another platform only creates latency and poor user experience. Many of the successful funded gen AI startups — more than 60% of whom are building on Google Cloud — are using Vertex AI as the development host and productionalize backbone to accelerate innovation. In this moment of rapid transformation, every day matters. 

Our mission at Google Cloud is to support ambitious startups, like the three profiled below who are driving innovation in customer service, healthcare research, and identity verification. Abstrakt, NextNet, and Ferret are among the long list of startups using Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure and Vertex AI platform to accelerate their innovation. 

NextNet

NextNet is a specialized search engine for life sciences and pharmaceutical researchers that uses AI to analyze vast amounts of biomedical data. Leveraging Google Cloud Vertex AI and Gemini, it identifies hidden relationships and patterns within scientific literature, allowing researchers to ask complex questions in plain language and receive accurate answers. This accelerates research and drives innovation in medicine by facilitating a deeper understanding of complex biomedical information.

Specifically, NextNet uses Gemini for natural language processing and knowledge extraction, outperforming other commercial AI models in this domain. It also utilizes Vertex AI and other managed services to efficiently develop SaaS offerings and scale its knowledge base.

“Gemini, as a production platform, has been incredibly useful and allowed us to evaluate scientific research with subtlety and clarity,” Steven Banerjee, the CEO of NextNet, said. “On our specific language tasks, Gemini has equaled or outperformed other commercial AI models. We are extracting scientific insights now that would not have been possible 12 or 18 months ago. And the iteration speed of Google's generative models has meant that we are staying state of the art.”

Abstrakt

Abstrakt focuses on enhancing contact center customer experiences through the use of generative AI. They leverage Google Cloud’s robust infrastructure and the Vertex AI suite to transcribe calls in real-time while simultaneously evaluating sentiment. 

Their mission is to empower teams to have more meaningful and effective conversations with customers in real time, helping both call center workers and their customers resolve issues faster, so even more can get the help they need. Abstrakt aims to achieve this by providing instantaneous guidance and insights during calls, transparent progress tracking, and AI-guided coaching, leading to continued improvement for workers and customers alike. 

Ferret.ai

Ferret.ai is using AI to offer transparent insights about the backgrounds of people in your personal and professional network. In a world where reputational risks seem to be growing and rarely go away thanks to digital “receipts,” Ferret is using world-class global data alongside AI to provide a curated relationship intelligence and monitoring solution to help avoid risk and identify opportunities. 

The unique platform built by Ferret.ai pieces together information and finds patterns by using generative AI to analyze information, verify the source, assess its credibility, and achieve contextual understanding that identifies sentiment. They also use pattern recognition to analyze vast datasets to uncover potential red flags or inconsistencies that could be missed by human analysts. This is valuable for investors, businesses, and individuals who want to avoid scams, make smart partnerships, and ensure their safety. 

Faster innovation, faster time to market

These founders saw significant pain points and directed all of their resources to solving these problems for their customers. Deploying packaged back-end solutions, like Vertex AI’s unified development platform, benefited their speed to market. When Google Cloud takes care of model accuracy and performance, you’re freed up to own what you do best. 

Your needs as a startup can evolve quickly based on the dynamics of the market. Importantly our open ecosystem of models and APIs offer flexibility as you adapt and grow.

Go tackle your biggest challenges and let Google Cloud provide you with the most secure, fast, scalable platform so you can focus on the solutions that matter most to your users. For help getting started, you can apply for the Google Cloud for Startups Program or reach out to one of our startup specialists today.