Haptik’s founder Aakrit Vaish, investor Pratyush Choudhury launch $75 million AI fund Activate

Haptik cofounder Aakrit Vaish and former principal investor at Together Fund Pratyush Choudhury on Wednesday announced Activate, a new $75 million fund aimed at backing deep technical founders in India at the early stages, as per people in the know. The fund will invest $500,000 to $3 million in inception-stage startups, at the ideation level.

The fund has brought on board India and US-based names as limited partners ( sponsors of funds) including Indian-orgin billionaire Vinod Khosla (Kholsa Ventures), Aravind Srinivas (Preplexity), 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), Vishal Misra (Columbia) among several others focused on the AI ecosystem.

The founders emphasised that this network will help portfolio companies tap into expertise in 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 the fund intends to engage with such founders "even before company formation."

Activate’s thesis is built around four principles: velocity, with founders expected to ship and iterate far faster than previous startup cycles; depth, or extreme domain expertise; taste, which means high-judgment intuition for product decisions; and influence, which the founder said is now core to an organisation’s ability to build global solutions.

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

Activate is currently making its first set of investments. As angels, the founders have previously backed companies including Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park+, Rapidclaims and Spendflo.

Choudhury, former AWS engineer, in a separate post said much of his career has been about meeting founders “before the story is obvious- when it’s still messy, fragile and full of possibility.” “That’s the moment I love,” he wrote. He added that his focus has always been on helping founders “clarify the wedge, design the first product truth, and choose a path that compounds.”

Vaish’s Haptik was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019. As an angel investor, he has backed over 100 startups and recently served on the advisory board of the IndiaAI Mission. Choudhury was part of the team that invested in AI startups such as Composio, Emergent and Rocket.new, and runs APAC’s largest GenAI community.