Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish and Together Fund’s Pratyush Choudhury launch $75 Mn AI fund

Aakrit Vaish, co-founder of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhury, former principal at Together Fund, have launched Activate, a $75 million venture fund that will back early stage AI founders in India.

Vaish announced the launch on X.

The fund will invest between $500 K and $3 million in companies at inception, including those at the ideation stage.

Activate 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, among other AI focused leaders.

The founders said the LP network will give Activate portfolio companies access to guidance across AI research, infrastructure and global expansion. Activate’s model is based on four principles which are rapid product iteration, deep technical expertise, strong product judgment and close founder support.

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.

Vaish earlier founded Haptik which was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019. Choudhury previously worked at AWS and has been active in the GenAI community across the Asia Pacific region.