Google to open an incubator for Israeli companies (and it's free)

Google Israel has announced that it will open an incubator in its Tel Aviv offices in August 2012. The incubator will be free, and will allow start-up companies to stay for several months during which their personnel will be exposed to Google. Google will not take equity in the start-ups (Hat Tip: Lance K).

A Google research director made the announcement Sunday at the company’s annual conference for developers in Israel, saying that the incubator will open in August of next year in the same building as Google’s office in Tel Aviv.

Initially, Google’s incubator will host roughly 20 “pre-seed” start ups, or about 80 people, for a period of a few months, after which new companies will come into the incubator to replace them, and the project will be open to many types of start-ups but has an emphasis on open-source technologies.

Google, which isn’t expected to take equity in any of the participating start-ups, hasn’t yet announced how entrepreneurs can apply to the free program.

Google’s move is “very significant,” said Shuly Galili, executive director of the California-Israel Chamber of Commerce. “Google will have more accessibility to the talent and the know-how and what’s going on in that community,” she said, adding that she expects more U.S. tech companies to make similar moves in the future.

Galili is involved in a new “accelerator” for Israeli startups called Upwest Labs that will be based in Silicon Valley, providing a chance for Israeli entrepreneurs to work on their projects and meet with investors and technology companies based in the U.S. Google is one of Upwest’s sponsors, she said.

The Israeli incubator won’t be the first of its kind for Google, which earlier this year launched a similar program in Cape Town, South Africa.