Three Bay Area companies were selected for Google's fourth annual accelerator program for women-led startups.
Google chose 11 startups across the U.S. and Canada for this year's 10-week program, which offers mentorship, technical support and training to startups that have raised Seed to Series A funding.
The tech giant also looks for startups that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, or are interested in doing so, according to the program's FAQs section.
Female founders continue to struggle to raise venture capital, compared to all-male and mixed gender founding teams. Female-only founding teams in the U.S. raised just 1.6% of all the venture capital deployed in the first half of the year, according to a report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.
However, 2023 is shaping up to be the second best year for startups with at least one woman on the founding team and that's partly fueled by the AI race.
Google does not take any equity in the startups it selects for the women founders accelerator, according to the August 17 announcement.
The Bay Area startups that Google selected for its latest cohort were Redwood City-based Dreami, Mountain View-based Rejoy Health and San Francisco-based Shimmer.
Dreami is developing a platform for mentorship programs at businesses, educational institutions and other community organizations. We featured Dreami and its founder, Ashima Sharma, in this story last year about the Bay Area's DEI services ecosytem.
Rejoy Health is using AI and computer vision to build an app for physical therapy. It was founded by Ritu Ranjna and Rituraj Yadav.
Shimmer is developing an app that provides coaching for people with ADHD. It was founded by Christal Wang and Vikram Sreedhar.
