Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, former principal investor at Together Fund, have unveiled Activate—a new $75 million venture fund dedicated to supporting early-stage deep tech and AI founders in India. Positioned to back teams at the very earliest stages, the fund is designed for highly technical founding groups and aims to engage with them even before formal company formation. Vaish noted that Activate intends to invest between $500,000 and $3 million at inception, enabling founders to move quickly and build with strong conviction from day one.
Activate enters the ecosystem with the strength of an influential cross-border network of limited partners. The roster includes notable names from both India and the US: Vinod Khosla, Aravind Srinivas, Ashish Vaswani, Dhaval Shroff, Manohar Paluri, Shyamal Hitesh Anadkat, Shailendra J. Singh, Srikanth Velamakanni and Vijay Shekhar Sharma. This group brings a combination of technical expertise, entrepreneurial experience and global credibility—factors that the founders believe will be crucial in shaping AI-first companies with international potential.
The fund’s philosophy is built around four guiding principles: velocity, depth, taste and influence. These pillars form Activate’s blueprint for identifying teams capable of building globally competitive AI products. On its website, the firm also maps out a five-layer view of India’s AI opportunity, covering the full spectrum from applications and infrastructure tools to foundational models, rapid compute and physical infrastructure. By investing across this stack, Activate aims to nurture companies that can anchor India’s role in the next wave of deep tech innovation.
While the fund is new, the founders have already begun deploying capital. Previous investments associated with the team include companies such as Composio, Sri Mandir App, ZuAi Tech, Emergent, Park+, RapidClaims and Spendflo—reflecting a portfolio that spans applied AI, SaaS and consumer platforms. With Activate now formally launched, Vaish and Choudhury are positioning the fund as a launchpad for India’s next generation of AI-native startups, offering not just capital but also strategic guidance, technical insight and a high-trust support network for founders operating at the frontier of deep technology.
