Google Offering $100,000 In Cloud Platform Credits To Startups

Last month Google acquired Zync Inc, a company that has provided special effects for movies such as Star Trek Into Darkness. With that acquisition, Google gained the cloud-rendering visual effects company to try and make the creation of visual effects cheaper and lure people to use its Cloud Platform. Now Google is offering $100,000 in Cloud Platform credits as another incentive to make use of its platform.

In order to be eligible for the credit, a startup needs to meet the following criteria. First, the startup needs to be in an approved Accelerator, Incubator, or VC fund. Another criteria is that the startup hasn’t received previous Cloud Platform credit, has less than $5 million in funding, and earn less than $500,000 in annual revenue.

Should a startup meet those four requirements they will receive $100,000 Cloud Platform credits for one year and that can be applied to all of the Cloud Platform products. This includes products such as Cloud Storage, BigQuery which analyzes large amounts of data, and Prediction API that analyzes data to predict future outcomes.

The new incentive could be Google’s response when, back in March, Amazon announced price cuts to its own cloud storage services in order to stay competitive with Google’s own prices. Amazon’s price cuts were, in turn, a response to Google’s price reduction a month earlier.