Co-Connect Is in Google's 2026 AI Accelerator
Petr Cervenka
On this page 4 sections
We're in.
Google announced the 2026 Australia & New Zealand AI accelerator cohort this morning, and Co-Connect is one of the fifteen. Listed there as "an all-in-one workforce platform keeping frontline and remote workers informed, engaged, safe, and connected" — a fair description of the thing we have spent years building.
We have known for a little while. We could not say anything until Google published, which is a strange sort of quiet to sit in. So this post is mostly just: it is real, it is public, and we are very happy about it.
Co-Connect is one of our own ventures rather than client work — Nano Solutions built the platform and is its founding technical partner. Being picked out of a national field for something we own feels different to shipping someone else's project well.
What the program is
The Google for Startups Accelerator: Australia & New Zealand runs ten weeks, equity-free, for seed and Series A companies working with AI and machine learning. There is an in-person bootcamp at Google's Sydney office, then mentoring and sprint work across the rest of it. Founders bring their hardest technical problems and get paired with people who work on that class of problem for a living.
That last part is what we actually applied for. Co-Connect runs on phones at remote sites with one bar of signal or none — mine sites, camps, night shifts. Almost every AI tool being built right now quietly assumes a browser tab and a good connection, and we have neither. We have strong opinions about how that ought to work and a list of questions we cannot answer on our own. Ten weeks with Google's engineers is a good place to take them.
The rest of the cohort
Worth a look, because it is a decent snapshot of where applied AI in this part of the world actually is:
| Startup | What they do |
|---|---|
| Blunge | AI design agent turning ideas into finished, branded, editable designs |
| Bower | An operating system for capturing lab experiments and automating research admin |
| Co-Connect | All-in-one workforce platform for frontline and remote workers |
| CounterCurrent | Maritime forecasting and decision support for ship routing and safety |
| Eyes of AI | AI dental imaging for diagnosis and clinical decision-making |
| Gheorg | A robot companion for children's mental health and neurodiversity |
| Kimia | A chemical intelligence layer for materials manufacturing |
| Mentana | Autonomous supply chain management with AI-led forecasting |
| Merchmix | An AI inventory operating system for retail planning |
| Rainstick | Variable Electric Field technology for sustainable seed growth |
| RossOps | Operational memory for manufacturing floor intelligence |
| Terria | Spatial data intelligence for urban planning |
| Tiliter | Computer vision turning imagery into operational data |
| Totex Energy | Building energy management and renewable load shifting |
| Unseen | A trust layer for commercial real estate asset verification |
Mostly industrial, clinical and operational problems. Almost nothing consumer. That tracks with what we see from Perth: the money and the pain are both in operations.
We are in Sydney
Erin Bell, who founded Co-Connect, and I flew over for the bootcamp, so the announcement landed while we were sitting in a Google meeting room in lanyards, trying to look like people who do this all the time. Ten weeks start here.
We will be posting more as the ten weeks go — what we are working on, what we get wrong, and whatever we learn about running AI on a device that cannot phone home.
Image credits. The header graphic is the official Class of 2026 line-up published by Google for Startups. The photographs from the Sydney bootcamp are our own.
Sources
- Google for Startups Accelerator: Introducing our 2026 Australia & New Zealand AI Cohort — The Keyword, Google Australia, 31 August 2026. The cohort list and all company descriptions.
- Google for Startups Accelerator: Australia and New Zealand — program page. Duration, equity-free structure and format.
- coconnectapp.com — the product, and our Co-Connect case study for how it was built.
Petr Cervenka
Petr is the founder and lead developer at Nano Solutions, a Perth-based custom software firm. With over a decade of experience building enterprise platforms for government and private sector clients, he leads delivery of complex projects across Australia.
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