Former Haptik Co-founder Launches AI-Focussed VC Fund Activate

Months after leaving AI startup Haptik, India AI Mission advisor Aakrit Vaish has teamed up with former Together Fund partner Pratyush Choudhary to start a new AI-focused venture capital fund called Activate.

With this fund, the two plan to invest in early-stage startups that are built around AI, including AI apps, foundational models, physical infrastructure, and other related areas.

The fund plans to invest between $500K and $3 million in each startup. Activate has already started making its first few investments. The total size of the fund is expected to be around $75 million.

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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 begun making its first investments. Before starting the fund, Vaish and Choudhury had invested personally in startups like Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park Plus, Rapidclaims, and Spendflo.

Vaish previously founded Haptik, which was bought by Reliance Jio in 2019. Choudhury worked at AWS and has been active in the GenAI ecosystem across the Asia-Pacific region.

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