Activate launches $75 million fund to back India’s early stage AI founders

Activate, a new venture capital fund created by Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish and former Together Fund principal investor Pratyush Choudhury, has been launched with a corpus of about $75 million to support deep technical founders in India at the earliest stages of company-building.

The fund will invest between $500,000 and $3 million in inception-stage startups, often at the ideation phase. People familiar with the matter said this is one of the few domestic funds designed specifically to engage with technical teams even before formal company formation.

Activate has brought on board a network of India and US-based limited partners, many of whom are well-known names in global AI research and engineering. The list includes Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas, Ashish Vaswani of Essential AI, Dhaval Shroff of Tesla AI, Manohar Paluri of Meta, MIT Media Lab’s Ramesh Raskar, OpenAI’s Shyamal Anadkat, Peak XV’s Shailendra Singh, Fractal’s Srikanth Velamakanni, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and Columbia professor Vishal Misra, among others.

The founders said this network will help portfolio companies tap into expertise across AI research, infrastructure and global go-to-market strategy.

Announcing the fund on X, Vaish wrote, “I’ve been fortunate to build Haptik, invest in 100+ startups, and contribute to our sovereign AI strategy. Today, all of it comes together in my next act. Introducing Activate: India’s AI venture fund.” He added that AI in India will be built by “technical crack teams”, and that the fund aims to work with such founders “even before company formation.”

Choudhury, a former AWS engineer, wrote in a separate post that much of his work has involved meeting founders “before the story is obvious. When it’s still messy, fragile and full of possibility.” He said he enjoys helping founders “clarify the wedge, design the first product truth, and choose a path that compounds.”

Activate’s investment thesis is built on four principles. Velocity, which refers to rapid shipping and iteration. Depth, meaning domain-level technical mastery. Taste, or high-judgment intuition for product decisions. And influence, which the founders see as essential for building global solutions from India.

On its website, the firm outlined five stack layers where it sees India’s strongest AI opportunities. These include AI applications, infrastructure tooling, foundation models, accelerated compute, and physical infrastructure such as data centres and cooling systems.

Activate has begun making its first set of investments. As angels, Vaish and Choudhury have previously backed companies including Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park+, Rapidclaims and Spendflo.

Vaish was among the earliest entrepreneurs in India’s AI ecosystem. He co-founded Haptik in 2013 with Swapan Rajdev, building an enterprise conversational AI platform used by companies such as Swiggy, Zepto and Paytm. Reliance Jio acquired Haptik in 2019 for over Rs 200 crore.

Choudhury spent four years at Together Fund, where he was part of investments in AI companies such as Privado, DhiWise and Protecto.ai, and earlier helped lead AWS’s work with startup teams. He also runs one of APAC’s largest GenAI communities and has been a prominent supporter of early technical founders.