Aakrit Vaish, the founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, an investor, establish the $75 million AI fund Activate.
Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, former principal investor at Together Fund, have launched Activate, a $75 million fund to support early-stage AI startups in India. The fund will invest $500,000 to $3 million in inception-stage startups, even at the ideation stage.
Focus and Vision
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Activate aims to back deep technical founders in AI.
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The fund will help startups access expertise in AI research, infrastructure, and global go-to-market strategy.
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Vaish said the goal is to work with “technical crack teams” and support founders even before a company is formally created.
Limited Partners and Support
The fund has gathered a strong network of investors and AI experts as limited partners, including:
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Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)
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Aravind Srinivas (Preplexity)
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Ashish Vaswani (Essential AI)
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Dhaval Shroff (Tesla AI)
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Manohar Paluri (Meta)
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Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab)
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Shyamal Anadkat (OpenAI)
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Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm)
…and several others focused on AI.
Investment Principles
Activate’s approach is based on four key principles:
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Velocity – founders should ship and iterate faster than usual.
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Depth – extreme domain expertise.
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Taste – strong intuition for product decisions.
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Influence – ability to build solutions with global impact.
AI Opportunities
The fund focuses on five layers in India’s AI ecosystem:
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AI applications
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Infrastructure tooling
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Foundation models
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Accelerated compute
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Physical infrastructure (data centers, cooling)
Founders’ Background
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Aakrit Vaish: Founded Haptik, acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019; angel investor in 100+ startups; advisory board member of IndiaAI Mission.
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Pratyush Choudhury: Former AWS engineer; invested in AI startups like Composio, Emergent, Rocket.new; runs APAC’s largest GenAI community.
Activate is already making its first investments and aims to back founders early in their startup journey