AI-First Seed (Series A-track)

Compute-heavy AI startup, seed heading into early Series A

$1M+ in cloud + AI credits 10 programs · apply in order

Compute is your biggest cost, so stack every cloud and AI-infra credit you can. Join NVIDIA Inception before the clouds, then layer model providers, inference platforms, and a vector database.

  1. 1
    NVIDIA Inception NVIDIA Inception Free + GPU/hardware pricing

    Join first — it improves your AWS/GCP AI terms and gets you GPU access.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  2. 2
    AWS AWS Up to $300,000 (AI tier)

    The AI tier is far larger than the standard Founders credit — apply specifically for it.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  3. 3
    Google Cloud Google Cloud Up to $350,000 (AI track)

    Google’s AI/Scale track is one of the largest single credit pools available — pursue it in parallel with AWS.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  4. 4
    Anthropic Anthropic $1K–$25K+ Claude credits

    Direct-apply tier; demonstrate Claude is core to the product to unlock the larger amounts.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  5. 5
    OpenAI OpenAI $2,500 (via Ramp) / researcher credits

    Stack the Ramp rewards OpenAI credit, plus apply to any direct researcher/startup access.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  6. 6
    Together AI Together AI $15K–$50K (tiered by raise)

    Open-model inference and fine-tuning credits tiered by how much you’ve raised.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  7. 7
    Modal Modal Up to $25,000 (12 months)

    Serverless GPU compute credits — great for bursty training/inference without managing infra.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  8. 8
    Pinecone Pinecone Standard free + ~$5K

    Managed vector DB for retrieval — free Standard tier plus startup credits.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  9. 9
    MongoDB MongoDB $5,000+ Atlas + Voyage AI

    Atlas plus Voyage embeddings if you’d rather keep vectors next to your operational data.

    Eligibility & how to apply
  10. 10
    Datadog Datadog Up to $100,000 (1 year)

    Observability for a compute-heavy system — catch runaway GPU spend early.

    Eligibility & how to apply
A note: This is an editorial suggestion, not a guarantee. We're an independent directory and aren't affiliated with these programs — eligibility, amounts, and terms change, so confirm each on the program's own page. Apply only to what genuinely fits your startup.

Other playbooks

Bootstrapped AI Product

$15K–$50K in immediate credits

Solo or small team, no VC, building an AI-first product

Seed-Funded B2B SaaS

$500K+ in effective value

Seed-stage B2B SaaS with institutional funding

International (Non-US) Founder

$200K+ in credits + a Delaware C-Corp

Founder building a US entity from outside the US

Compliance-First (Enterprise Sales)

$500K+ in value + audit readiness

B2B SaaS selling into enterprise that requires SOC 2 / ISO / HIPAA