Google has been tracking the world's hottest startups since 2012

Since 2012, Google exec Suman Prasad and his team have worked with multiple Silicon Valley venture firms to identify "rocketship" startups before they actually take off, and then help plug them into the Google machine.

The team helps the startups build apps for Android phones, hook into Android Pay, and utilize countless other Google services, ranging from Google Maps to Google Ads.

Wired reports that Prasad started the project in his Google "20 Percent Time," but it has since grown to become something much bigger. He is now director of startups and VC partnerships, and at all times, Project Sand Hill currently serves at least 100 US startups, in addition to about 30 outside the US, including places such as Israel, India and China.

Google also runs its own venture capital arm, GV, but it is interested in other ways of tracking the ever-changing tech landscape - and keeping its increasingly gigantic company at the frontlines of innovation.

“The speed at which startups go from being a small startup to becoming a material company was accelerating,” Prasad says, according to the Wired report. “We wanted to partner up with companies before they came up with the next big thing.”

As it continues to evolve from being a Silicon Valley disruptor into a corporate giant, Google is looking for just about any way to keep itself at the cutting edge. It even reorganized itself into a new company - Alphabet.

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Eventually, this may be a road to strategic acquisitions. Plus, it can also help the profiles of all of Google technologies that are already well-established, like Android and Maps. This sort of thing is common practice across the tech world - Apple just launched a new accelerator in India meant to drive new iOS apps in the country.

Current members of Google Project Sand Hill include ticketing platform Eventbrite, and last-minute hotel booking company Hotel Tonight. And Google says eleven Project Sand Hill companies have gone on to become "unicorns" - startups that are valued at over a billion dollars - since joining the program, including Eventbrite, Houzz and Lyft. Around half of participating companies have gone on to raise a combined $7.5 billion in funding.

So what about the startups on the other side of the equation? Is Project Sand Hill good for them? Rouz Jazayeri, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who introduced Google to startup My Fitness Pal, thinks so.

Initially, Jazayeri was skeptical, but he quickly saw the value. “It delivered on its promise,” he says. “We had direct relationships and direct engagement with multiple product groups inside Google, and the company made that happen within a very short time frame.”

This includes the teams that run Google Fit, Android Wear, and Google Play. Mike Lee, My Fitness Pal CEO, says the company also got early access to new developer tools and advice on how best to optimize Google Ads.

This more so highlights how much premium Google places on these kinds of relationships. If companies use its services, it sees, to a certain extent at least, where they are going. It basically gets a lay of the land: a window into the wide market.