Zoom Communications, Inc. has announced AI Launchpad, a new grant program offering eligible startups up to US$150,000 in Zoom AI Services credits to build and scale next-gen AI-native applications, completely equity-free.
Removing the costly barrier posed by multi-vendor APIs, the program provides founders with access to the AI technology used in Zoom’s own products, plus technical support to accelerate go-to-market growth.
X.D. Huang, chief technology officer at Zoom, explains:
“AI startups should spend time solving real problems, not stitching together infrastructure. AI Launchpad gives founders the same industry-leading AI technology that powers our own products, plus resources to move faster and focus their engineering talent where it matters most.”
Building AI-powered products often forces startups to stitch together a patchwork of expensive third-party providers for speech, language, and decision-making. AI Launchpad helps eliminate this hurdle by providing a unified platform, so developers can spend more time building their products and less time managing the technology behind them.
The program builds on Zoom AI Services, which delivers Zoom’s AI capabilities to developers through standalone APIs. These services span speech recognition, summarisation, translation, voice AI, and decision intelligence, so developers can build applications that better understand conversations, generate responses, and take action.
AI Launchpad extends Zoom’s investment in AI infrastructure to emerging companies developing new products across industries.
Helping startups build with Zoom AI Services
Startups can use Zoom’s APIs to develop a range of AI-powered products, including:
- Voice AI and customer service agents that understand voice requests, generate natural responses, and support customer interactions.
- Conversation intelligence applications that transcribe and summarise calls, meetings, and other audio to surface useful information and support follow-up workflows.
- Multilingual experiences that use translation and speech capabilities to help people communicate across languages.
- AI-powered workflows that use the Decisions API to analyse information, classify requests, and help determine the next action.
The program offers three tiers based on a startup’s stage, technical needs, and eligibility, and credits are available for up to 12 months. Participating startups may also receive engineering guidance, opportunities to showcase their products through Zoom’s developer channels, and introductions to potential enterprise customers.
Applicants will be evaluated based on their product, team, technical approach, traction, and plans to build with Zoom AI Services. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, with a limited number of startups accepted into the program.
To learn more about AI Launchpad and apply, click here.
