Google is building an AI startup incubator that draws on its network of former employees, the so-called “Xooglers”, according to Bloomberg.
The pitch is neat in its logic: as some of the company’s most capable people leave to start their own AI ventures, an incubator built around alumni keeps Google close to them, and close to whatever they build next.The move would slot into machinery Google has already assembled.
The company runs the AI Futures Fund, a joint effort from Google DeepMind and Google Labs that pairs equity funding with technical collaboration and early access to DeepMind’s models, typically co-investing up to around $2m in early-stage frontier startups.
Alongside it sit the Google for Startups accelerators, equity-free and cohort-based. An alumni incubator would add a third channel, one aimed squarely at people who already know how Google works because they used to work there.
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The appeal of that focus is practical: a former employee needs no introduction to the company’s systems, its researchers, or its models, which makes the relationship cheaper to build and quicker to put to use.
The reason such a channel makes sense is the talent exodus it answers. Former staff from Google and DeepMind, along with alumni of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for ventures only months old.
Venture investors have funnelled roughly $18.8bn into AI startups founded since the start of 2025, much of it chasing names recognisable from the labs that built today’s frontier models.
For a company watching senior researchers walk out to incorporate, an incubator is a way to convert a loss into an early-stage stake.
The departures are not abstract. David Silver, a central figure behind AlphaGo, left DeepMind to found Ineffable Intelligence, a venture backed by Sequoia and Nvidia at around $5.1bn before it had shipped much of anything.
A separate group of ex-DeepMind founders raised $20m for Airspeed’s AI sales agents. And the Nobel laureate John Jumper left DeepMind for Anthropic, a reminder that the pull is not only toward founding companies but toward rivals as well.
Set against that, an incubator reads as defensive and opportunistic at once. If the most ambitious people are going to leave regardless, Google would rather be the first investor and the first technical partner than a bystander reading about the funding round later.
It is the same instinct behind the company’s broader spending posture; DeepMind’s chief executive has said Google will outpace Microsoft on AI investment, and an alumni vehicle extends that ambition from infrastructure to founders.
There is a tidy symmetry to the design. The people most likely to leave a frontier lab are the ones who understand its tools best, which makes them exactly the founders a frontier lab would most like to fund.
An incubator that keeps alumni inside Google’s orbit, with access to models and capital, lowers the cost of leaving while preserving the company’s claim on the upside.
Whether the former employees see it that way, or prefer the independence that drew them out in the first place, is the open question.
The company is said to be developing the incubator, but its structure, the size of the fund behind it, the cheques it would write, and the launch timing remain undisclosed. Google has not commented publicly.
