OpenAI and Thailand’s Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) have launched the OpenAI x MHESI AI Accelerator in Bangkok to help local startups turn AI prototypes into deployable products. The ten-week program brings together ten startups working across health, wellness, and education—five in medical/wellness AI and five in education. Participating companies include CARIVA, Wello Food, Dietz, Precisionize, FitSloth, Curico, insKru, Floaino, EasyKids Robotics, and Globish. Each startup receives $2,000 in OpenAI API credits, one-on-one technical guidance, access to frontier models, and a dedicated mentor. Weekly sessions cover product design, engineering, automated testing, evaluation, responsible AI, privacy and security, cost management, growth, and fundraising. MHESI connects teams with research and talent networks; the National Innovation Agency (NIA) links them to funding and growth ecosystems; Mahidol University provides academic expertise. The accelerator is OpenAI’s first public-private partnership with the Thai government focused on local startups.

The initiative is grounded in growing AI adoption in Thailand. OpenAI’s internal data shows Thailand ranks among the top 20 countries globally for ChatGPT weekly active users. Since the start of 2026, weekly active usage of Codex in Thailand has grown more than 350-fold, also placing the country among the top 20 globally for Codex usage. The accelerator aims to bridge the gap between compelling demos and products people can rely on, especially in high-stakes domains like healthcare and education.

Each startup sets a specific milestone for the eight-week program—product pilot, evaluation, or commercial goal. For example, CARIVA is developing a multilingual voice agent for hospital phone lines that can handle routine requests like appointment scheduling and recognize medical emergencies; it aims to deploy the first capability in a pilot hospital’s live call flow by Demo Day. Curico is building AI-powered learning tools for children and educators, with plans to pilot in Bangkok childcare centers, train over 200 teachers, test AI-assisted grading at Chulalongkorn University, and grow its family learning platform to over 1,000 monthly active users.

The accelerator will conclude with a Demo Day in Bangkok in November, where startups will demonstrate working products, share user evaluation evidence, and present deployment plans to investors, government agencies, universities, hospitals, schools, and potential customers. OpenAI and MHESI view this first cohort as the beginning of a longer-term effort to establish a repeatable model that helps Thai founders build trusted AI products and take solutions developed in Thailand to the global market.