Aakrit Vaish and Pratyush Choudhury Unveil USD 75 Mn Activate Fund Activate plans to invest between USD 500,000 and USD 3 million in early stage AI startups.
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Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, former principal at Together Fund, have launched Activate, a new venture fund worth USD 75 million to support early stage AI founders in India.
Vaish announced the launch on X, stating that the fund will focus on companies at inception, including those still at the ideation stage.
Activate plans to invest between USD 500,000 and USD 3 million in young startups.
The fund has brought together a global group of limited partners that includes Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity, Ashish Vaswani of Essential AI, Dhaval Shroff from the Tesla AI team, Manohar Paluri of Meta, Ramesh Raskar of MIT Media Lab, Shyamal Anadkat of OpenAI, Shailendra Singh of Peak XV, Srikanth Velamakanni of Fractal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm and Vishal Misra of Columbia University. Several other AI focused leaders are also part of the network.
The founders said the LP network will help Activate portfolio companies receive guidance across AI research, infrastructure development and global expansion. They explained that Activate's approach is built on four principles which are rapid product iteration, deep technical expertise, strong product judgment and close founder support.
Activate has already begun making its first investments. Before setting up the fund, Vaish and Choudhury invested as angels in companies such as Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park Plus, Rapidclaims and Spendflo.
Vaish earlier founded Haptik, which was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019, while Choudhury previously worked at AWS and engaged actively in the GenAI community across the Asia Pacific region.
