.png)
Hatch has been accepted into the Google for Startups Cloud Program at its AI tier, the highest band Google offers funded startups.
What the tier actually is
Google runs the program in three bands. Start, worth $2,000 in credits, for pre-funded companies with a working MVP. Scale, for startups with verifiable Pre-Seed to Series A funding. And Scale AI, the top band, reserved for companies where AI is the product rather than a feature added to one.
Google's published terms for the AI band are 100% coverage of up to $250,000 in Google Cloud credits in year one, and 20% coverage of up to a further $100,000 in year two. Up to $350,000 across two years. A non-AI startup at the Scale band is covered up to $100,000 in year one on the same structure.
The credits are the headline, but the rest of the package matters more at our stage:
- Credits for frontier models including Gemini and Gemma
- Technical and product training through Google Skills
- 12 months of Google Workspace Business Plus
- Monthly Google Maps Platform credits
- Access, as the company scales, to Startup Success Managers and Google's Customer Engineering teams
Acceptance is at Google's sole discretion and is assessed on funding stage, funding type, business model, founder experience and product usage. Companies that have IPO'd or been acquired are not eligible, and neither are agencies, consultancies or dev shops.
Why the classification is the interesting part
Google draws a line between companies that bolted an AI feature onto an existing product and companies whose product does not exist without AI. Putting a chatbot in the corner of a dashboard puts you on one side of that line. Hatch sits on the other.
That is not a boast, it is a description of the work. Measuring what a workforce produced, when half of that workforce is now agents appearing on a cloud bill rather than an org chart, is not a reporting feature. It is inference over messy, high-volume signal from systems that were never designed to talk to each other. There is no version of Hatch that is a spreadsheet with a model stapled to the side.
What we are doing with it
Running the measurement layer properly rather than cheaply. The honest constraint on a company like ours is not ambition, it is the cost of inference at the volume this problem requires. Two years of covered compute removes that constraint from the roadmap, which means the questions we answer are product questions rather than budget ones.
What this does not mean
Worth stating plainly, because this category is full of companies implying more than they have.
This is not an investment. Google has not taken equity in Hatch. It is not an endorsement of our product, a partnership, or a certification of anything. It is a credits and support program with published criteria, and we met them.
What it does mean is that the thing we are building is expensive to run and now easier to run. That is the whole of it, and it is enough.
