Perks

The Google for Startups Cloud Program covers Vertex AI, Gemini API, GPUs/TPUs and the rest of Google Cloud. Pre-funded companies get $2,000; seed-to-Series A startups get up to $200,000 over two years, or up to $350,000 if the company is AI-first.

AWS Activate gives any startup $1,000 of credits on the Founders tier (growing to $5,000 as you use AWS). The Portfolio tier, up to $200,000, is for startups affiliated with an Activate Provider; AI Lounge is applying to become a provider so members can claim it with an AI Lounge organization ID.

Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub starts you at $5,000 of Azure credits (including Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry) and unlocks higher tiers up to $150,000 as you grow, plus GitHub Enterprise seats, Microsoft 365 and partner offers.

Claude Startups members get offers worth up to $45,000 from companies building with Claude, biweekly group sessions with Anthropic's Applied AI team, and invites to Founder Days, Builder Days and hackathons. The current cohort is full and new applications are paused. Startups backed by a VC in Anthropic's partner network can claim up to $100,000 in API credits through that VC.

OpenAI distributes API credits through partner channels. VC portfolios, accelerators, Ramp, Brex and the Grove program, from $2,500 for early companies to larger grants for backed startups, plus events and early access.

Mistral's startup program (Mistralship) provides La Plateforme credits, technical support and events for early companies building on Mistral's open-weight and frontier models, with European data hosting.

Together AI's startup accelerator gives AI-native startups inference and fine-tuning credits on open models (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, FLUX) plus engineering support.

ElevenLabs Startup Grants give early companies 12 months of access with 33 million characters, over 680 hours of Agents usage, for text-to-speech, voice agents and dubbing. ElevenLabs values the grant at more than $5,500.

Deepgram's startup program funds speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent usage for new customers building voice products.

AssemblyAI offers early-stage startups transcription and audio-intelligence credits plus technical support for products built on voice data.

Runway's Builders Program supports startups building on Runway's video models with API credits, early access and introductions to Runway's venture fund.

Cloudflare for Startups gives a year of credits for usage-based services such as Workers, Workers AI (up to $50,000), R2 (up to $10,000), AI Gateway and Vectorize. Core security and networking features are included at no cost. Tiers: $10,000 with no minimum funding, $100,000 for startups under $5M raised and funded by a Cloudflare partner, and $350,000 for startups with $5M+ raised.

DigitalOcean Startups (formerly Hatch) gives 12 months of credits for Droplets, Kubernetes, managed databases and the AI platform, plus 15 months of free Standard support. The credit amount is set by the DigitalOcean Startups partner you apply through.

Vercel for Startups gives eligible teams up to $30,000 of Vercel usage credit (valid up to one year), Enterprise-tier access and startup-focused support. Vercel also runs the AI Accelerator, a selective cohort with partner credits, for AI startups with traction.

Supabase provides credits through partner accelerators and programs (for example $40K sponsored into the Vercel AI Accelerator); AI Lounge is applying to be a partner so members can claim credits directly. Until then, the Pro plan ($25/mo) covers most launches.

MongoDB for Startups gives $5,000 in Atlas credits (vector search included) and technical advisors; the AI Innovators track adds up to $5,000 more for AI products built on Atlas and Voyage AI.

New Notion customers get the Business plan with Notion AI free: 3 months for any qualifying startup, 6 months with a partner key (AI Lounge is applying for one).

PostHog gives startups $50,000 of credits for a year across product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking and LLM analytics.

HubSpot for Startups discounts Marketing, Sales and Service Hub (including Breeze AI): 90% off year one, 50% year two and 25% year three for partner-affiliated or venture-funded startups, or 30% off year one for other early startups.

Intercom's Early Stage program gives startups 93% off the AI-first helpdesk in year one (from $65 a month), then 50% off in year two and 25% in year three. It includes 300 free Fin AI agent outcomes and 15 free sales qualifications per month.

Stripe Atlas forms a Delaware C-corp or LLC, opens banking and tax setup, and includes a perks bundle (AWS, MongoDB, Notion and 100+ partners) worth well over $100,000, plus waived Stripe fees on your first $100K in payments.

Baseten runs dedicated inference and training for AI-first companies. The startup program gives up to $25,000 in credits for dedicated inference or training deployments plus up to $2,500 for Baseten Model APIs, with support responses within a few business hours, cross-cloud autoscaling and launch amplification.

Fireworks serves open models (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, FLUX, Whisper) at production speed. The startup program grants credits, sized per company, valid for one year, that cover text and vision inference, image generation, speech-to-text, embeddings, fine-tuning and on-demand GPU deployments, plus raised rate limits.

Inception is NVIDIA's program for AI startups: no fees, no equity, no cohorts. Members get free self-paced Deep Learning Institute courses and discounted workshops, preferred pricing on select NVIDIA hardware and software, cloud credits from NVIDIA and partners (Nebius AI Lift up to $150K, Lambda $7,500 and others), Capital Connect investor introductions and co-marketing. Join it first, several other perks on this list require it.

Nebius is a large NVIDIA GPU cloud (Hopper and Blackwell) with managed clusters and an inference service. Through AI Lift, NVIDIA Inception members can receive up to $150,000 of cloud credits for training and scaling, $10,000 of inference credits, priority access to the newest GPUs, fast-tracked onboarding and co-marketing.

Lambda runs on-demand and reserved NVIDIA GPU instances and 1-click clusters. NVIDIA Inception members can claim $7,500 of Lambda Cloud credits through the Inception partner offers.

Modal is serverless compute for AI: Python functions that scale to thousands of GPUs per second. The startup program gives free compute credits (Modal does not publish the amount; founders report $500 to $50,000 depending on stage), direct access to Modal's engineering team and GTM amplification for launches and raises.

Runpod offers GPU pods, serverless endpoints, clusters and storage. The Starter tier gives pre-Series A startups $1,000 of credits with self-serve onboarding; the Growth tier adds $25,000 of bonus credits on a $50,000 commitment ($75,000 total) with a 12-month agreement and a dedicated onboarding call.

Neon is serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero, now part of Databricks. Self-funded startups get up to $1,000 of Neon credits; venture-backed startups get up to $200,000 in combined Neon and Databricks credits, onboarding from the Neon product team, early feature access and co-marketing. Credits are valid for 12 months and existing users can apply for added credits.

Datadog for Startups gives up to 12 months of the complete Datadog platform (infrastructure, APM, logs, LLM Observability, security) with up to $100,000 in credits, onboarding materials and an optional technical engagement manager. Applications must come through a referral partner, a VC, accelerator, hyperscaler startup program or vendor program.

GitHub for Startups gives $10,000 in credits on a GitHub Enterprise Cloud account, usable for 12 months on Enterprise licenses and add-ons including GitHub Copilot (licenses, premium models and agent features), GitHub Advanced Security and other metered products.

Three months of Perplexity Enterprise Pro for your whole team (up to 50 seats: frontier models, deep research, file search, team workspaces) plus $5,000 of credits for the Sonar API, search-grounded answers with citations you can build into your product.

Pinecone is the managed vector database behind many RAG and agent products. The startup program gives free access to the Standard tier (any cloud/region, RBAC, backups, import, Prometheus metrics) and Pro Support with a dedicated Slack channel, plus usage credits and discounts as you grow.

Retool is the fastest way to build internal tools, admin panels and AI workflows on your data. Eligible startups get a 100% discount on the monthly Team or Business plan for one year (value up to $60,000), 25% off the following year, partner deals worth $160K and playbooks from fast-growing startups.

Sentry catches errors, slow transactions and broken releases across your web, mobile and backend code, including AI agent traces. Startups get $5,000 of credits (valid for one year), priority support and swag.

Linear is the issue tracker and planning tool most AI-native teams use. Through its partner program, startups backed by a Linear partner get the Business plan (initiatives, insights, SLAs, Linear Asks, admin controls) free for up to six months.

Mixpanel's Startup Plan gives a year of product analytics free: all advanced reports, 1 billion events, 1 million Session Replays, Experiments (1.2M MEUs) and Feature Flags, plus Data Pipelines, Group Analytics and Warehouse Connectors. Mixpanel values the plan at $145,000.

Render hosts web services, workers, cron jobs, Postgres and Key Value with git-based deploys. Every qualified startup gets $500 in credits; startups applying through a Render accelerator or VC partner get $2,500 to $25,000, and the AI tier gives $100,000 to AI-native companies backed by a top-tier partner VC. A separate migration credit of up to $10,000 covers switching costs. Credits are valid for one year.

Amplitude's Startup Plan is the full Growth plan free for 12 months: product analytics, session replay, experiments, MCP and agents, up to 100 million events a month and unlimited teammates, with 40% off in year two. Most startups are approved instantly.

Runware is one inference API for image, video, audio, LLM and 3D models. The Starter tier gives bootstrapped and pre-seed teams up to $1,000 in credits with no deposit, awarded in $100 steps based on your application. The Growth tier adds $10,000 on a $25,000 deposit and the Scale tier adds $30,000 on a $50,000 deposit. Credits do not expire and work across every model and modality.

Resend is the developer email API used by many AI products for transactional and marketing email. Y Combinator companies get $25,000 in credits for 12 months in the current batch, or $15,000 as YC alumni, plus direct access to the founders and engineering team.

Neo4j's Startup Program gives Aura credits for a managed, production-ready graph database, used for GraphRAG, knowledge graphs and agent memory, plus technical guidance and co-marketing. Existing Aura users can apply too.

Algolia provides hosted search and AI-powered discovery for products and docs. Approved startups get $10,000 in Algolia credits to use within 12 months, partner deals (Datadog, Notion and more) and early access to new features.

Sanity is a content platform for websites and in-app content. Startups get one year of the Growth plan free, worth up to $9,000, then move to standard pricing.

Weights & Biases tracks training runs and evaluates LLM apps and agents (Weave). Members of Microsoft for Startups get 50% off the Pro plan for one year; W&B values Pro at $3,000 a year.

Auth0 for Startups gives early companies everything in the B2B Professional plan free for 12 months: login, organizations, enterprise SSO connections, MFA and Auth for AI agents.

Clerk handles sign-up, login, user management and organizations for React and Next.js apps. The startup program discounts Clerk Pro features on top of the free tier; the discount period starts on approval.

Mintlify builds documentation sites that are readable by people and agents (llms.txt, MCP). Startups get Pro at half price for a year plus priority support; companies in a current partner batch get 12 months free.

AgentGrown is an MCP server that gives Claude Code, Cursor or Codex your Google Search Console and GA4 data plus keyword demand, so the agent can decide what to build and fix for search. Approved startups get $300 of credit, valid for 6 months.

Zendesk for Startups gives the Zendesk Resolution Platform, including AI agents and Copilot, free for up to 50 agents. The standard term is 6 months; startups referred by a Zendesk VC or accelerator partner can get 1 or 2 years.

Customer.io sends lifecycle email, push, SMS and in-app messages from product events. Startups new to Customer.io get up to 12 months of Journeys, Data Pipelines, messaging and its AI agent at no cost, for up to 30,000 customer profiles. No credit card required.

Atlassian for Startups gives Premium editions of Atlassian Cloud products, including Jira, Confluence, Loom and Rovo, free for 12 months for up to 50 users. Each startup can enroll once.

Shortcut is project management and issue tracking for software teams. Approved startups get the Business plan plus SAML SSO free for 12 months, with no VC or accelerator affiliation needed.

Zoom Workplace Business Plus covers Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Scheduler, Whiteboard and Clips with AI Companion. Eligible startups get it free for one year for up to 25 seats.

Ramp provides corporate cards, bill pay and expense management for startups, and gives customers access to more than $350,000 in perks and credits from partners such as AWS, Datadog, Notion, OpenAI, Google Cloud and Retool.

Stripe Startups gives venture-backed companies credits against Stripe processing fees, a cap on Stripe Invoicing (from 0.4%, up to $10 per invoice), product support and a founder community. Separate from Stripe Atlas.

Deel runs global payroll, employer of record and contractor payments in 150+ countries. Venture-backed startups get their first 5 seats free for life, and Deel offers 3 months free on its US PEO plus free US payroll for founders.

Oyster is an employer of record for hiring full-time employees and contractors in 120+ countries without local entities. Startups save up to $1,200 per team member annually for the first 12 months, with no minimum number of hires.

Snowflake for Startups gives eligible companies free usage on their first contract, technical help and go-to-market support. Startups building customer-facing apps can apply to the 6-month Startup Accelerator, and portfolio companies of select VCs get extra free usage.

GitLab is the all-in-one DevSecOps platform: source control, CI/CD, security scanning and GitLab Duo AI. Seed-stage startups get Ultimate free for a year for up to 20 seats (SaaS or self-managed), then 50% off in year two. Series A and B startups get 50% off in year one and 25% off in year two.

OVHcloud is a European cloud provider. Its Startup Program gives 12 months of credits for Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud, plus one-on-one time with OVHcloud engineers: €10,000 and 6 engineer hours at the Start level, up to €100,000 and 20 hours at the Scale level. No investor or partner is needed. Bare metal is not covered, and GPU credits apply to older cards (V100, V100S, RTX 5000).

JetBrains makes IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand, Rider and the rest of its IDEs, plus JetBrains AI and the Junie coding agent. Startups get up to 50% off for five years, on up to 10 IDE subscriptions, 10 team or learning tool subscriptions and 10 JetBrains AI subscriptions.

Make is a visual automation and AI agent platform that connects thousands of apps. Its Startup Program gives the Teams plan free for up to 6 months, then 50% off any plan for 3 months, plus startup workshops and priority support.

Miro is the visual workspace for whiteboarding, product planning and diagrams, with Miro AI built in. Startups that apply directly can get a $500 credit, and startups connected to a Miro partner get $1,000. Venture-backed startups can also get 25% off the Enterprise plan.