The city has been a leader on AI governance with the GovAI Coalition. City officials have worked to create an AI ecosystem, complete with staff training and AI-powered accessibility initiatives.
AI companies are already moving business operations into the city, and officials are spurring more growth through the AI Incentive Program. The city opened program applications in March and received more than 170 applications.
“We’ve just seen that there’s a lot of power that government has,” said San Jose Chief Innovation Officer Stephen Caines. “If you just lean and make a stage, then people will come.”
The four winners will not only receive grants — three totaling $50,000 and one totaling $25,000 — but they will also get professional support including real estate consulting, legal services, and IT consulting hours.
The winning startups are Elythea, Metafoodx, CLIKA, and Satlyt. The winners were selected by a panel of judges including technology leaders from companies such as IBM, CBRE, and Coactive. Although each startup is using AI, their missions vary greatly.
Elythea is using AI to support maternal health, identifying and supporting those with high-risk pregnancies early. CLIKA is turning AI models into hardware-ready formats. Metafoodx uses AI to help food service operators reduce waste. Satlyt is an AI-driven startup integrating satellites into a cloud, to improve data processing.
Judges selected the winning companies based on several factors, including their solutions’ potential benefits to the community, Caines said. Other considerations were feasibility and ethical AI standards — including sustainability.
Metafoodx’s CEO and co-founder, Fengmin Gong, said via email that the funding will accelerate the business’s capacity to bring AI into food operations: “At Metafoodx, our mission is to make our food system sustainable by reducing waste and risk systematically, and this support empowers us to scale our technology faster and amplify our positive impact on communities, institutions, and the environment.”
Although only four startups received the grants, the other applicants will be invited to the San Jose Innovates meetup series convening AI stakeholders, allowing them to share knowledge and make connections.
City officials have found that private-sector businesses in the community have a desire to get involved to support government initiatives like this — especially in Silicon Valley — but they don’t always know how to get involved, Caines said. Governments that are not creating a channel for businesses to partner with them are missing an opportunity, he said.
“And so, we’re actually being able to take intentional steps to build that door for [corporate entities] to be able to meaningfully contribute as well,” Caines said, indicating officials believe this program could serve as a model for other cities with a rich innovation ecosystem.
This announcement is part of the city’s broader strategy for AI, one component of which is AI upskilling for city staffers. The city recently graduated its second cohort and has plans to expand the 10-week training program next year.
When it comes to AI literacy, Caines said that local governments cannot wait.
As cities face workforce disruptions, upskilling can proactively support both employees’ professional development and worker retention. Any effort that supports retention for city staff, Caines said, is “really crucial.” Ensuring staffers have the tools to do their jobs in ways that are most beneficial to their individual workloads, he said, can improve their quality of life.
“These are investments that we’re making that we’re just confident will pay off in the long run,” Caines said.
The city’s various AI-focused initiatives are intended to connect to and build off of one another in a “continuum,” as Caines described it. This includes the AI Incentive Program, the Downtown AI Hub, the GovAI Coalition, and the AI Center of Excellence.
One of the winning startups is actually based out of the AI Center of Excellence, the chief innovation officer said. Another is relocating from Sunnyvale, Calif., to San Jose with the funding through this program. Officials hope the incentive program and the city’s broader AI ecosystem will support tech and AI stakeholders in their perception of San Jose as the place where they can grow their companies.
“So, it’s triggering exactly the type of action that we wanted,” Caines said.
