Ex-Haptik CEO Launches AI-Focussed VC Fund Activate

Months after stepping down from AI startup Haptik, India AI Mission advisor Aakrit Vaish has partnered with ex-Together Fund partner Pratyush Choudhary to launch a new AI-focussed venture capital (VC) fund Activate. 

With the fund, the duo would look to invest in early-stage AI-native startups across segments such as AI applications, foundational models, physical infrastructure, and other allied verticals. 

The fund plans to dish out average cheques sizes in the range of $500K to $3 Mn. Activate is currently in the process of making its early investments.

The total corpus of the fund is said to be around $75 Mn.

In a social media post, Vaish claimed that the fund’s limited partners (LPs) include Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas, upGrad’s CEO Ronnie Screwvala, Khosla Ventures’ Vinod Khosla, Fractal’s Srikanth Velamakanni, Peak XV Partners’ Shailendra Singh, among others. 

“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.

It is pertinent to note that Vaish was perhaps one of the earliest entrepreneurs in the Indian AI startup ecosystem. He, along with Swapan Rajdev, founded Haptik in 2013 to build a conversational AI platform for enterprises. 

The startup allows enterprise clients, including the likes of Swiggy, Zepto, Paytm, to undertake various tasks such as travel bookings, place food delivery orders on a single platform.

The startup was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019 for over INR 200 Cr. While Vaish left the CEO position of the company in February 2025, Rajdev continues to serve as its CTO. 

Meanwhile, Activate’s second cofounder Choudhary has been an active investor since 2021. In his four year long tenure at Together Fund, he led the VC firm’s investment in AI startups like Privado, DhiWise, Protecto.ai, among others.

This comes at a time when investor interest in the nascent AI segment has been on a significant upward trajectory on the back of robust funding, localised innovation, and new use cases. 

Funding influx has surged in recent times with homegrown AI ventures attracting international investments as well as domestic support.

Beyond funding, big tech companies are also doubling down on India and bolstering their AI capabilities – from Indic AI models to data centres. Google and Microsoft, too, recently earmarked big ticket investments to build AI data centers in the country.

On the regulatory front, the government recently unveiled IndiaAI Governance Guidelines to ensure responsible AI adoption across sectors.

The norms propose a governance framework to foster innovation, “safely” develop and deploy AI offerings and mitigate risks posed by the emerging technology. The new norms underline seven guiding principles, called Sutras, for ethical development of AI tools. 

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