Two weeks left: Google's Accra lab offers African founders DeepMind models before anyone else sees them
Applications for the first Google Africa Applied AI Lab close on 31 August. The programme is based at the Accra AI Community Centre in Ghana and is open to full-time founders and to researchers who intend to become founders, working in five areas: work, knowledge, software development, creativity and entertainment. Selected teams get early access to Google DeepMind models — Gemini, Gemma and Veo — before general release, hands-on technical mentorship from Google Research engineers and product specialists, and go-to-market support from Google and venture partners. Preference goes to startups with commercial traction, from pre-seed to Series A, though earlier-stage applicants are accepted. Notifications begin in September; the co-development phase runs from mid-September to early December and ends with a demo day in Accra in front of Google teams, investors and ecosystem partners.
Related stories
A free year of Google's paid AI plan is open to college students in 140-odd countries — and it has to be claimed by 31 December2026-08-20A 90-day agent-building contest opened on Friday: open to anyone anywhere, free to enter, ₹18 lakh in prizes, closes 15 November
2026-08-17A paid eight-week alignment fellowship closes on Monday — and it asks for no institution behind you
2026-08-15OpenAI offered 100,000 researchers free frontier access. The first round has become a lottery.
2026-08-12Eight weeks, $12,000 and a GPU budget to work on AI safety — from anywhere, if you apply by 17 August
2026-08-09