OpenAI launches Thai startup accelerator with MHESI
OpenAI and Thailand's science ministry launched an eight-week accelerator for ten local health and education startups, the company's first public-private partnership with the Thai government and its latest sovereign-adjacent push in Asia.
OpenAI announced the OpenAI x MHESI AI Accelerator in Bangkok, an eight-week program run with Thailand's Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation. It is OpenAI's first public-private partnership with the Thai government aimed at local startups, delivered with the National Innovation Agency (NIA), Mahidol University, and Techsauce.
Each of the ten companies receives US$2,000 in API credits, access to OpenAI's latest frontier models, a dedicated mentor, and one-on-one technical guidance. Weekly sessions cover product design, engineering, automated testing, evaluation, responsible AI, privacy and security, cost management, growth, and fundraising. Teams set a product, pilot, evaluation, or commercial milestone, and are expected to show a working product or substantial upgrade, evidence from representative users, and initial evaluation findings by a Demo Day in Bangkok in November.
The cohort splits evenly between medical and wellness AI and education: CARIVA, Wello Food, Dietz, Precisionize, FitSloth, Curico, insKru, Floaino, EasyKids Robotics, and Globish. It was selected with NIA, the Ministry of Education, and the MHESI innovation network, and includes teams from the earlier AIAT × OpenAI Codex Hackathon Bangkok. CARIVA is building a multilingual voice agent for hospital phone lines and aims to deploy in a pilot hospital's live call flow.
OpenAI said its internal data places Thailand in the global top 20 for ChatGPT weekly active users, and that weekly Codex usage there has grown more than 350-fold since the start of 2026 — also a top-20 position. No funding figures beyond the credits were disclosed.