Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, a former principal investor at Together Fund, have launched a new fund called Activate, targeting $75 million. According to the announcement, this fund focuses on supporting early-stage founders in India who are deep technical innovators.
Announcing on X on Wednesday, he said, “We believe AI in India will be built by technical crack teams. Activate is created for such founders, engaging with them well before company formation and investing $500k-$3 million at inception.”
I moved back to India in 2013 with a simple mission: to build AI for the country.
Since then, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to build Haptik, invest in 100+ startups, co-create TEAM for Mumbai and contribute to our sovereign AI strategy through the IndiaAI Mission. Today, all of… pic.twitter.com/OgruUnBOPf
— Aakrit Vaish (@aakrit) December 3, 2025
The fund has engaged a number of limited partners from India and the US, including Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, CEO of Preplexity Aravind Srinivas, Ashish Vaswani of Essential AI, Dhaval Shroff of Tesla AI, VP of AI in Meta Manohar Paluri, OpenAI’s Shyamal Anadkat, Peak XV’s Shailendra Singh, Srikanth Velamakanni from Fractal, and Vijay Shekhar Sharma from PayTM, among various others, concentrated on the AI ecosystem.
Activate’s strategy centers on four key principles: velocity for rapid product launch and refinement, depth for extensive domain expertise, taste for strong judgment in decision-making, and influence for the ability to create global solutions, the website said.
The firm has also detailed five layers of value on its website, identifying India’s AI prospects. These layers include AI applications, infrastructure tools, foundational models, rapid computing, and physical infrastructure such as data centres and cooling systems.
Activate is in the process of making its initial investments. As angel investors, the founders have previously supported companies like Composio, Sri Mandir, Spry, ZuAI, Emergent, Park+, Rapidclaims, and Spendflo.
Vaish, who previously founded Haptik, saw the company acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019. Choudhury has a background in AWS and has been an active participant in the GenAI community throughout the Asia Pacific region.
The post Haptik’s Aakrit Vaish & Together Fund’s Pratyush Choudhury Launch $75 Million Fund for Indian AI Startups appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
