We're in.
Google has announced the 2026 Australia & New Zealand AI accelerator cohort, and Co Connect is one of the fifteen. Google describes us as “an all-in-one workforce platform keeping frontline and remote workers informed, engaged, safe, and connected through critical communication, journey management, and GIS wayfinding” — a fair description of the thing we have spent years building.
We have known for a little while, but could not say anything until Google published. So this post is mostly just: it is real, it is public, and we are very happy about it.
The Google for Startups Accelerator 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.
Co Connect runs on phones at remote sites with one bar of signal, or none at all — 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.
Co Connect App is part-owned by Nano Solutions, our business partner and founding technical partner, who built the platform with us. Being picked out of a national field for something we own together feels different to shipping a project for someone else.
The accelerator is under way. It began on 1 September 2026, runs for ten weeks, and finishes with a demo day in November 2026.
Since the five-day bootcamp at Google's Sydney office, Erin has been meeting weekly with an assigned Google infrastructure architect while Co Connect builds a search tool on early-stage Gemini products — aimed at the problem we applied with: getting the right information to a worker on a remote site, fast, when connectivity is poor.
The program provides technical mentoring, workshops and early access to AI products. Google does not take a stake.
As reported by The West Australian, Co Connect is Western Australia's only entrant in the 2026 cohort, and the only company in it focused on the resources sector.
Fifteen companies made it through, and the list is a decent snapshot of where applied AI in this part of the world actually is: mostly industrial, clinical and operational problems, and almost nothing consumer. That tracks with what we see from Perth — the money and the pain are both in operations.
The full cohort is listed below, with links to each of them.
Erin and Petr flew over for the bootcamp, so the announcement landed while we were sitting in a Google meeting room in Sydney. Ten weeks start here.
We will be posting more as they go — what we are working on, what we get wrong, and whatever we learn about running AI on a device that cannot phone home.
All fifteen companies selected by Google for the 2026 Australia & New Zealand cohort.
Read Google's announcement, or more about the Google for Startups Accelerator: Australia & New Zealand.
Header image courtesy of Google. Co Connect App is built with Nano Solutions, our business partner, part-owner and founding technical partner.