Activate, a new VC fund created by Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish along with former Together Fund principal (name needed), marks their entry into early-stage investing.
Investor Pratyush Choudhury has rolled out the fund with a corpus of nearly $75 million to help deep-tech entrepreneurs in India at the earliest phases of building their companies.
The fund aims to invest $500,000 to $3 million in inception-stage ventures, often supporting teams at the ideation level. People familiar with the initiative noted that it is among the few India-based funds designed to collaborate with technical teams even before a company officially takes shape.
Activate has secured a strong network of limited partners from both India and the US, featuring some of the most recognizable names in AI research and engineering. Among them are 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), Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and Vishal Misra of Columbia University.
The founders noted that the network will support portfolio companies by giving them access to specialists in AI research, infrastructure, and global go-to-market planning.
Vaish introduced the fund on X, saying, “From building Haptik to investing in 100+ startups and contributing to our sovereign AI efforts, everything now comes together in my next act. Introducing Activate: India’s AI venture fund.” He emphasized that AI in India will be built by “technical crack teams,” adding that the fund aims to partner with such founders “even before a company is formed.”
Choudhury, a former AWS engineer, shared in a separate post that his work frequently involves engaging with founders “before the story is obvious—while it’s still messy, fragile, and filled with potential.” He added that he loves helping them “identify the wedge, shape the first product truth, and choose a path that compounds.”
The firm’s investment thesis rests on four guiding ideas: velocity, emphasizing rapid execution; depth, highlighting domain-level technical expertise; taste, representing refined, high-judgment product instincts; and influence, which the founders consider key to building global-scale solutions from India.
The firm’s website outlines five layers of the AI stack where it sees the biggest opportunities for India: AI applications, infrastructure tooling, foundation models, accelerated compute, and the physical backbone like data centres and cooling systems.
Activate has kicked off its first round of investments. Before this, Vaish and Choudhury, as angels, had invested in companies including Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park+, Rapidclaims, and Spendflo.
An early pioneer in India’s AI scene, Vaish co-founded Haptik in 2013 alongside Swapan Rajdev. The team built an enterprise conversational AI platform serving clients like Swiggy, Zepto, and Paytm. In 2019, Reliance Jio acquired Haptik in a deal worth over ₹200 crore.
During his four-year tenure at Together Fund, Choudhury was involved in investments in AI-focused companies like Privado, DhiWise, and Protecto.ai. Before that, he helped steer AWS’s work with emerging startups. He also runs one of the largest GenAI communities in APAC and is known for championing early technical founders.
