In a major boost to India’s rapidly expanding artificial intelligence ecosystem, Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish and Together Fund’s former principal Pratyush Choudhury have launched Activate, a $75 million venture fund dedicated to backing early stage AI startups. The fund aims to empower founders building at the earliest stages, including those still at the ideation phase.
Activate will invest between $500K and $3 million per company, reflecting the founders’ belief that India is entering a generational AI wave where early technical innovation needs strong capital and hands on mentorship.
The fund has attracted a global roster of influential LPs from the AI, research and tech community. Notable names include Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Ashish Vaswani (Essential AI), Dhaval Shroff (Tesla AI), Manohar Paluri (Meta), Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab), Shyamal Anadkat (OpenAI), Shailendra Singh (Peak XV), Srikanth Velamakanni (Fractal) and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm). Their involvement is expected to offer portfolio founders unparalleled access to expertise across AI research, infrastructure scaling and global market expansion.
Activate operates on four core principles rapid product iteration, deep technical specialization, strong product judgment and high touch founder support. According to Vaish and Choudhury, these pillars are essential for building category defining AI companies.
Prior to launching Activate, the duo had already built a strong track record as angel investors in ventures such as Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park Plus, Rapidclaims and Spendflo.
Vaish’s earlier startup Haptik was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019, while Choudhury has held roles at AWS and has been an active contributor within the GenAI community across the Asia Pacific region.
With Activate, the founders aim to fuel India’s next generation of AI-first companies and position the country as a global innovation hub.
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