When venture funding tightens, founders get scrappy. In 2025, agility no longer just means lean teams and fast pivots; it means being AI-native.
Control over your own software, and increasingly your AI infrastructure, is fast becoming the core competency of resilient startups.
Walking the walk
Startups today aren’t just pitching ideas, they’re deploying them. At the heart of this new wave of product-led founders is the rise of agentic AI: active, autonomous agents capable of decision-making, learning, and executing tasks without constant human oversight.
More than a buzzword, agentic AI is quickly becoming an operational advantage. It enables startups to scale common business processes, from customer support to research automation, more efficiently and with fewer resources.
This is where Google for Startups’ Startup School: Agentic AI comes in. The program gives early-stage founders and technical teams the tools to build generative AI applications on Google Cloud, with a curriculum that turns theory into production-ready systems.
Anchored in world-class software
The 2025 edition of Startup School arrives on the heels of major announcements at Google I/O, where the Gemini model family showed significant improvements in reasoning, context retention and developer tools integration. With Gemini now a leading contender across LLM benchmarks, startups joining the program get access to some of the most advanced AI capabilities available.
And this isn’t new territory for Google; Startup School has already trained thousands of founders in leveraging the latest AI and cloud tech. Previous editions have covered everything from early cloud architecture to deploying ML models, and Agentic AI is the next evolution.
A curriculum for builders
Startup School: Agentic AI's curriculum is designed for builders ready to get hands-on. The series progresses from fundamental concepts to increasingly advanced technical terrain. Participants start by architecting intelligent agents and move towards nuanced tasks like model selection. The program culminates in hands-on training with the Agent Development Kit, a set of tools designed to accelerate their AI application building.
By the program’s end, founders aren’t just integrating AI, they’re leading with it.
A Network, Not Just a Course
What separates the startups that succeed from those that stall isn’t just capital; it’s access to infrastructure, mentorship and community.
What sets Google’s Startup School apart is the peer network and mentorship it fosters. Founders aren’t building in isolation, they’re learning alongside a global cohort of teams solving similar challenges, all while getting expert guidance from Google engineers and product leads.
2025 is shaping up to be the year of agentic scaling, where startups grow not by adding headcount but by deploying AI agents. In this new paradigm, capital helps but capability wins.
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