GCP – Rice University and Google Public Sector partner to build an innovation hub in Texas

Rice University and Google Public Sector are partnering to launch the Rice AI Venture Accelerator (RAVA), designed to drive early-stage AI innovation and commercialization. This collaboration enables RAVA to connect AI-first startups with leading enterprises in healthcare, energy, transportation, and the public sector, aiming to drive AI-powered solutions to pressing industry challenges.

In an increasingly AI-driven world, the RAVA team acknowledges the critical need to balance speed of innovation and security. RAVA aims to create an ecosystem where founders can be both bold and responsible by bringing the simplicity, security, and intelligence of Google Cloud’s information approach to their startup.

Through this collaboration, direct access to Google Cloud’s AI experts, cloud computing, and sandbox services. Google Cloud will provide a full-stack AI, data, and security sandbox environment that will enable AI-first startups to rapidly prototype, scale faster, and save money.

The AI-optimized sandbox will include the following capabilities:

• AI
  • Automated provisioning and management of environments tailored to industries including healthcare, energy, transportation and public sector. These environments will include connections to Google Cloud’s differentiated data sets like Alphafold and access to fully managed services like Health Data Engine, Google Earth Engine and Google Maps.
  • AI-infused accelerators, including Graphical Process Units (GPUs) and Google Cloud’s custom-design Arm-based processors (Axion) and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for analytics, information retrieval, and ML training
  • Multi-agentic AI framework and a unified development platform via Google Vertex AI Platform which includes Agent Builder and 160+ first-party (Gemini, Imagen 3), third-party, and open (Gemma) foundation models.
• Data & Analytics
  • Modernized API management via Apigee to build, manage, and secure APIs—for any use case, environment, or scale.
  • Business and embedded analytics via Looker to explore and share insights in real time as well as access to hundreds of cross-industry public datasets via BigQuery
• Security
  • The industry’s first multi-cloud security solution — Google Security Command Center, including Model Armor, — as well as Sensitive Data Protection to protect LLM models and data sources against unauthorized exposure, prompt injections, and jailbreak attacks.

Google Public Sector will also provide dedicated training to RAVA startups and supporting teams to maximize their AI literacy and industry adoption.

“We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Rice AI Venture Accelerator in partnership with Google Public Sector,” Rice President Reginald DesRoches said. “This collaboration builds on Rice’s decades-long history of innovation and aligns perfectly with our mission to transform breakthrough research into real-world impact. Through RAVA, we are creating an ecosystem where industry leaders can access the next generation of AI-driven solutions.”

“Google Public Sector is excited to partner with RAVA to build an AI Innovation Hub that will enable startups to accelerate innovation and solve the most complex challenges across different industries. Through our collaboration, we are hoping to help startups to do more with less and to effectively adapt to rapidly changing environments,” said Reymund Dumlao, Google Public Sector Director of State & Local Government and Education

For more information about RAVA, visit https://nexus.rice.edu/rava.

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