Over the past few years, as the education sector was going through transformative change, EdTech startups rose to meet the demand of learners and help address some of the biggest challenges in education. At Google Cloud, we’re inspired by how EdTech startups continue to solve challenges with agility, innovative technology, and determination. We’re proud to help EdTechs make learning more personal, safe, and accessible, and we’re working to connect EdTech startups with the right people, products, and best practices that will help them grow

Announcing a new partnership with StartEd

Google Cloud is excited to announce a partnership to offer mentor-based programming for EdTechs with StartEd — an organization that accelerates education innovators addressing Early Childhood, K-12, HigherEd, Workforce, and Adult Learning. 

Founded by entrepreneurs nearly ten years ago, StartEd is on a mission to attract and develop a network of innovators working to ensure equitable, quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. The company trains and connects thousands of diverse entrepreneurs, educators, and investors at for-profit and not-for-profit organizations each year, working alongside corporations, foundations, and higher education institutions across the United States. 

StartEd has helped grow more than 2,500 companies and built a mentor network of over 800 senior leaders with deep expertise in early-stage EdTech companies. The StartEd community now numbers more than 25,000 members. 

“I am thrilled to embark on this transformative partnership with Google Cloud,” said Ash Kaluarachchi, StartEd CEO and managing director. “This alliance not only amplifies our mission to empower and nurture the world’s education innovators at every point in their journey, but it also unlocks unprecedented potential for the entire EdTech ecosystem. Together, we’re poised to redefine the future of education and work and to create lasting, positive impact for generations to come.”

Mentoring and networking opportunities for EdTech startups

Through this partnership, U.S.-based EdTech startups can apply to a new program, StartEd sponsored by Google Cloud. The program offers startups access to personal coaching, hands-on training, business support, and a large network of industry experts to help them accelerate their growth and transform education. Beyond the benefits from StartEd, startups will gain access to cloud credits, technical support from Google Cloud, and coaching from Google’s education leadership.

Apply to StartEd, sponsored by Google Cloud, today.

A “one size fits all” approach to education no longer works in today’s classrooms. Using cloud-based technologies, schools and educators can take a more personalized approach to education–one that suits each student’s unique learning style, abilities, and needs. 

Taking the lead toward more equitable educational opportunities worldwide, education technology pioneer, LearningMate, is partnering with Google Cloud to offer intelligent, personalized learning via Google Cloud’s Student Success Services.

In a student survey by EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education through the use of information technology, nearly all respondents asked for more digital learning and study options. Given a list of educational material types, such as study guides and recorded lessons, 93 percent said they would like to have online access to at least two options and more than half (56 percent) chose seven or more. 

The trend towards student choice challenges educators to reconsider how they teach and support learners. Students expect the same qualities in their lessons as they encounter in their other, non-school related digital experiences: personalization; user-friendliness; and engagement. Educators who are used to a more top-down education model can struggle to meet these new expectations. 

Google Cloud created Student Success Services to help education institutions meet learners where they are—in the digital age. This suite of tools and services uses Google’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and analytic tools to:

• Engage with students via an AI-powered learning platform and interactive tutor
• Help educators and learners collaborate more effectively
• Provide current, actionable data on student progress 

To bring our Student Success Services to more schools and organizations worldwide, we’re partnering with LearningMate — a global leader in digital learning infrastructure. LearningMate is a key go-to-market partner, helping schools design, launch, and maintain their own learning infrastructure. To start, LearningMate is adding Google’s AI-powered learning platform to its Frost platform, a popular content management for education. 

As the education model continues to change and digital learning becomes the norm, disadvantaged students risk getting left behind. For these learners, the “digital divide” is very real, and stands to hinder them further–not only in school, but in society and the workplace in later life. 

“The gap will only widen between those with digital advantages and those who struggle to gain access to devices and network necessities,” EDUCAUSE states. To meet all these challenges, schools need a diverse mix of tools, methods, and partnerships.

To help close the digital divide among students, digital tools need to be able to scale up or down so institutions and districts of any size and budget can use them. Google Cloud designed Student Success Services with this ability in mind. By offering these services, LearningMate aims to ensure that even schools with smaller teams and fewer resources can offer individualized learning experiences to their students. 

With LearningMate and Google’s nearly 40 years of combined experience in education, this partnership aims to help educators better understand their students’ engagement, performance, and preferences. To learn more about Student Success Services and our collaboration with LearningMate, watch this session from our Government and Education Summit.

For the fourth consecutive year, Gartner has positioned Google as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (formerly titled as Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service upto 2014 Infrastructure as a Service, or (IaaS).

With our customers and communities adjusting to new ways of working and doing business, Google Cloud has remained focused on building services and platforms that help you be more resilient and derive even more value from your cloud infrastructure. We believe Gartner’s analysis and recognition gives our customers the confidence needed to choose Google as the platform for customer-centric innovation. Here are just a few recent examples.

Ready for the most demanding, mission-critical workloads

Our enterprise-ready cloud provides you the uptime, performance, and scale to run even your most demanding workloads. Examples of recent launches: 

• The largest single-node GPU-enabled VM in the industry with up to 16 NVIDIA A100 instances so that our customers can run their ML workloads 
• The only cloud to support scale-out out 96TB SAP HANA so that customers can confidently bring their most critical workloads to GCP
• Strategic partnerships with leading partners like SAP 
• Several regions and an expanded global network footprint including new subsea cables, Firmina, Dunant, Blue and Raman
• High bandwidth 50/75/100Gbps networking for VMs
• Persistent Disk Extreme (block storage) with 120K IOPS 
• Filestore High Scale scale-out NFS for HPC

Saves you money

Save money with a transparent and innovative approach to pricing and intelligent recommendations. In the past year, we’ve launched several innovations to help you save costs:

• Tau VMs, which offer the best price-performance among leading clouds for scale-out workloads 
• Machine-learning-driven predictive auto-scaling for VMs and GKE Autopilot, enabling infrastructure to scale up and down as needed with minimal waste 
• Standard network tier which routes traffic over the internet for cost optimization 

Open

We have a long history of leadership in open technologies—from projects like Kubernetes, the industry standard in container orchestration and interoperability, to TensorFlow, a platform to help anyone develop and train machine learning models. Here are a few recent improvements we’ve made to ensure your cloud is an open cloud: 

• Extended Anthos to bare metal and Microsoft Azure to support customers who want a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud posture. 
• Announced a new network dataplane for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos that supports eBPF, an open-source Linux kernel technology optimized for Kubernetes. 
• Google Kubernetes Engine (based on the Kubernetes standard) received the top overall score based on 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine.

Secure

Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure uses layers of security to protect your data with advanced technologies and operations, keeping your organization secure and compliant. For example, we offer:

• Confidential VMs and Confidential GKE with in-memory encryption and encryption keys controlled by you, with a single checkbox
• Enhanced security for Cloud Run
• Strong support against DDoS attacks. In 2017, our infrastructure absorbed the largest-known DDoS attack at 2.5Tbps with no impact to customers. 

Sustainable

Google Cloud helps customers transform their business sustainably. We operate the cleanest cloud in the industry to make sure your digital footprint doesn’t leave a carbon one. Here are a few proof points:

• Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and for the past four years has matched 100% of the electricity we consume globally with wind and solar purchases. Everything you run on Google Cloud is net carbon neutral. 
• We continue to innovate towards greater energy efficiency in our data centers, and compared with five years ago, now deliver around seven times as much computing power with the same amount of electrical power.
• Recently we announced new features to help customers reduce the carbon footprint of their applications and infrastructure, including a region picker to help with architecture decisions, and low carbon indicators in the Google Cloud Console.  

Supporting our customers

Most importantly, our field organizations and partner organizations work with a singular focus to ensure customer success. This has made Google Cloud the fastest growing hyperscaler, with a rapidly expanding customer base across all geos and industries.

Since launching Customer Care last year, we consolidated and simplified the post-sales engagement with customers, increased the support channels, created an API to allow programmatic case creation, and combined product specific support into a single package for all of Google Cloud. Enterprises with Customer Care continue to report high levels of satisfaction with their focused technical account managers (TAMs), helping them get the most business value out of Google Cloud.

We are committed to sustaining and accelerating the pace of customer-centric innovation. You can download a complimentary copy of the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services on our website. 

Join us to learn much more about Google Cloud at the upcoming Google Cloud Next ‘21 digital conference.  

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services,  Raj Bala | Bob Gill | Dennis Smith | Kevin Ji | David Wright, 27 July 2021
Gartner, Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine,  Tony Iams | Traverse Clayton | Megan Bain, 12 April 2021
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}

We introduced the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability designation earlier this year to showcase those partners committed to help global businesses and governments accelerate their sustainability programs. These partners build solutions that enhance the capabilities and ease the adoption of powerful Google Cloud technologies, such as Google Earth Engine and BigQuery, allowing customers to leverage data-rich solutions that help reduce their carbon footprints.

Today, we’re pleased to announce growth of the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program, with 12 new partners joining the initiative and bringing their climate, ESG, and sustainability platforms to Google Cloud. These partners include:

Aclima is pioneering an entirely new way to diagnose the health of our air and track climate-changing pollution. Powered by its network of roving and stationary sensors, Aclima measures air pollution and greenhouse gasses at unprecedented scales and with block-by-block resolution.

Sustainability at Airbus means uniting and safeguarding the world in a safe, ethical, and socially and environmentally responsible way. Airbus has a comprehensive sustainability strategy built on four core commitments, which guide the company’s approach to the way it does business and how it designs its products and services: Lead the journey toward clean aerospace, respect human rights and foster inclusion, build the business on the foundation of safety and quality, and exemplify business integrity.

Atlas AI is a predictive analytics platform that analyzes, monitors, and forecasts regions of growth, vulnerability, and opportunity around the world to offer insight into where organizations can grow most successfully, and where investment can boost historically underserved communities. Atlas AI’s platform has been used to expand water and sanitation infrastructure, promote new electrification, target community health services, and broaden internet access in countries across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

BlueSky Resources makes sense of sensors from both public and private sources by harmonizing inputs from ground, aerial and space based inputs. Expertise in atmospheric science and cloud technology allows BlueSky to provide understanding and insights related to the correlation of emissions insights to assets and activities. This powerful combination of data, climate science and delivery of insights is enabling focused sustainability impact across clients in various industries including energy, waste management, industry and natural resource management.

Electricity Maps provides companies with actionable data quantifying the carbon intensity and origin of electricity. This data is available on an hourly basis across 50+ countries and more than 160 regions. Electricity Maps’ mission is to organize the world’s electricity data to drive the transition toward a truly decarbonized electricity system.

FlexiDAO is a global climate tech company based in the Netherlands and Spain. The company works closely with other critical stakeholders to co-create the international standard around energy-related emissions compliance. Thanks to FlexiDAO’s end-to-end 24/7 Carbon-free Energy platform, companies can quantify and confidently showcase their contribution to society’s decarbonization.

LevelTen Energy helps organizations achieve carbon-free energy usage targets (on an annual and 24/7 basis) by delivering access to the world’s largest clean energy marketplace, and the software, data, analytics, and expertise required for efficient transactions. The LevelTen Platform connects energy buyers and over 40 sustainability advisors with more than 1,800 carbon-free energy projects in 24 countries across North America and Europe.

Ren is a SaaS platform built on Google Cloud that enables companies with global supply chains to source the cleanest energy possible. Despite using country-sized amounts of energy, most companies have no idea how to transition to renewables due to complex financial, technical, and logistical challenges. Ren unlocks cost savings, provides the cleanest energy possible, and ensures companies meet their carbon commitments on time.

Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation unit in Google, builds products to radically improve quality of life in cities for all. Delve is a product that helps real estate teams design more sustainable buildings and neighborhood blocks, faster. Mesa automates building controls to deliver savings and comfort to commercial building owners and tenants. With these products and others, Sidewalk Labs helps commercial real estate developers, building owners and city planners make more sustainable choices for the built environment that are better for communities and the planet.

Tomorrow.io is The World’s Weather and Climate Security Platform, helping countries, businesses, and individuals manage their weather and climate security challenges. The platform is fully customizable to any industry impacted by the weather. Customers around the world use Tomorrow.io to dramatically improve operational efficiency. Tomorrow.io was built from the ground up to help teams prepare for the business impact of weather by automating decision-making and enabling climate adaptation at scale.

UP42 is a geospatial developer platform and marketplace bringing together industry-leading data and ready-to-use processing algorithms. The platform enables organizations to build, run, and scale geospatial products. With the ability to choose from a wide range of high-resolution commercial and open satellite data, aerial, weather, and others, solution providers can apply best-in-class machine learning and/or processing modules to gain valuable geospatial insights and streamline their processes.

Woza is a sustainable innovation platform that leverages deep geospatial knowledge and existing best-in-class technologies to develop a new generation of streamlined analytics workflows focused on sustainability. Companies in agri-food, energy, and public sector are partnering with Woza to accelerate their journey to Industry 4.0.

Adding expertise to accelerate sustainability use cases

New partners in the initiative join our existing Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability partners like Carto, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet Labs PBC bringing a wealth of industry knowledge, offering solutions for sustainability challenges ranging from first-mile sustainable sourcing and spatial finance to fleet electrification and rich geospatial visualizations.

CARTO is the world’s leading Location Intelligence platform, enabling organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioral marketing, strategic store placements, and much more. The company’s solutions extend the geospatial capabilities available in BigQuery, while leveraging the near limitless scalability that Google Cloud provides. When it comes to sustainability, CARTO’s platform is trusted by a wide range of organizations, including Greenpeace, Vizzuality, Litterati, Indigo, WWF, the Marine Conservation Institute, The World Bank, and the Institute for Sustainable Cities.

Climate Engine leverages data from Google Earth Engine and other ecosystem partners to help organizations improve their climate change-related risk planning in areas such as water use, agriculture, storm risk, and wildfire spread. By linking the economy and the environment, organizations can understand how environmental risks are affecting their markets and discover opportunities to reduce their emissions and potential supply chain or operational disruptions from climate-related events.

Geotab is advancing security, connecting commercial vehicles to the cloud, and providing data-driven analytics to help customers better manage their fleets. Processing billions of data points daily, Geotab helps businesses improve and optimize fleet productivity, enhance safety, and achieve sustainability goals and stronger compliance.

Geospatial solutions provider NGIS built a SaaS-based first-mile sustainable sourcing solution called TraceMark using Google Cloud’s geospatial platform and technologies from other ecosystem partners. Several global CPG firms have already used TraceMark to modernize their geospatial workflows and help facilitate the use of space-based data for supply chain sustainability transformation.

Planet Labs PBC operates the largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites in history, with approximately 200 satellites in orbit. Planet’s mission is to image the whole earth’s landmass every day to make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. As a Public Benefit Corporation, Planet’s Public Benefit Purpose is to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change.

How the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program works

If you are a Google Cloud partner with sustainability solutions and expertise to share, the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program is open for applications. Entry into the program requires that the partner solution delivers quantifiable results for climate mitigation, adaptation, or reporting needs. To apply for the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability designation, the solution must:

• Be available on Google Cloud
• Address ESG risk, and assist customers in achieving ESG targets and/or support typical ESG goal frameworks, such as the United Nations’ SDGs
• Demonstrate repeatability
• Meet minimum Google Cloud application development best practices, including security, performance, scalability, availability, and carbon footprint reporting for available services
• Have Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Reporting enabled
• Have at least one public customer case study available.

The selection process begins with an evaluation of the solution. If a partner meets the above criteria, Google Cloud provides a suggested roadmap for tier progression within the program and then issues a formal acknowledgement of participation in the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program. Together, Google Cloud sustainability partners can deliver platforms that are helping businesses and governments accelerate progress aligned to their environmental goals.

Google Cloud will showcase the validated solutions on the Google Cloud Partner Directory Listing, Google Cloud Ready Sustainability Partner Advantage page, and — if applicable — via the Google Cloud Marketplace. We hope to help customers better understand how these technologies can help them meet their ESG goals, find the right solution for their particular challenge, and implement a solution faster.

Prospective partners can visit the Partner Portal to learn more about the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program or complete an application.