Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, former principal at Together Fund, have launched Activate, a $75 million venture fund to back early-stage AI founders in India.
The fund will invest between $500,000 and $3 million in companies at inception, including those at the ideation stage.
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.
Activate has already started making its first set of investments. Before creating the fund, Vaish and Choudhury invested as angels in companies such as Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park Plus, Rapidclaims and Spendflo.
