Months after leaving AI startup Haptik, Aakrit Vaish — now an advisor to the India AI Mission — has joined hands with former Together Fund partner Pratyush Choudhary to launch a new AI-focused venture capital fund called Activate.
With this fund, they plan to back early-stage startups working in AI — from AI apps and foundational models to physical infrastructure and other related technologies.
Activate will invest between $500K and $3 million in each company, and it has already begun making its first investments. The fund is expected to have a total size of around $75 million.
Activate has brought together a global group of backers, including 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), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm), and Vishal Misra (Columbia University), along with several other AI-focused leaders.
“We believe AI in India will be created by technical crack teams. Activate is purpose-built for such founders, engaging with them well before company formation and investing $500K to $3 Mn at inception,” the post read.
Activate has already started making its initial investments. Before launching the fund, Vaish and Choudhury had personally backed startups such as Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park Plus, Rapidclaims, and Spendflo.
Vaish is the founder of Haptik, which was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019. Choudhury previously worked at AWS and has been actively involved in the GenAI ecosystem across the Asia-Pacific region.
Read More- HSBC has appointed the former KPMG partner Brendan Nelson as its new chair
