In December 2025 I graduated with the Caliana team from the first cohort of the Google for Startups: AI Solution Lab Program 2025. Caliana is the company where Spead AI is incubated and where I worked under the President Director; the product we brought to the program was Spead AI, and the graduation certificate is issued to Caliana. It is the kind of validation I value most: of how the product is built, not of what it promises.
The graduation certificate, issued to Caliana.
What the program validated
For us, the core of the program was architectural review. Spead AI runs contextual RAG engines on top of an organisation's internal documents, which means the system has to be secure by default, able to scale across regions, and resilient when a component fails. Over the program we worked through that design with the program's mentors, and graduated with the technical architecture for secure, globally scalable and resilient AI systems on Google Cloud Platform validated.
Two practical things came with it. Compute access, which at our stage is the difference between testing an idea on a laptop and testing it against real document volumes. And technical mentorship, which mostly meant experienced people asking uncomfortable questions about our data boundaries, our failure modes and our costs before a client did.
Why it matters
A validated architecture is not a product, and I am careful not to describe it as one. What it gives Spead AI is a foundation I can put in front of an enterprise or a state-owned company without asking them to take the infrastructure on faith. The 87% reduction in document time that Spead AI reports from its pilot is only meaningful if the system behind it can be trusted with corporate data, and this program is part of how I answer that question. The next step is to keep earning it, one pilot at a time.
Questions people ask
- Yes. Spead AI was the product the Caliana team brought to the first cohort of the Google for Startups: AI Solution Lab Program 2025; the team graduated in December 2025 and the certificate is issued to Caliana.
- A validated architecture for secure, globally scalable and resilient AI systems on Google Cloud, compute access and technical mentorship.
