India needs its own institutions that just don't participate in AI — they shape it.

We believe AI in India will be built by technical crack teams. Activate is a new age venture firm purpose-built for such founders, engaging with them well before incorporation and investing $500k–$3M at inception.

Aakrit ran Haptik, one of India's first AI companies (acquired by Reliance Jio). Angel investor in 100+ startups and recently Advisor to IndiaAI Mission. Pratyush was part of the team that backed Composio, Emergent, Rocket.new from India. Runs APAC's largest GenAI community.

The Activate platform combines Capability, Community & Content — honed through 2 decades of shared experiences & deep networks.

Inception Investing

We partner with founders before incorporation, helping validate ideas and co-building during the earliest product stages. Our engagement goes beyond capital—we bring hands-on support to help teams move from zero to one.

We lead the first institutional funding round, investing $500k–$3M to accelerate development. From technical architecture to go-to-market, we help founders build with velocity, depth, and taste.

Community

Our LPs include some of the foremost technology leaders across the India-US corridor:

Aakash Chaudhry, Sparkl
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity
Ashish Vaswani, Essential AI
Ashutosh Sharma, Prosus
Avnish Bajaj, Z47
Dhaval Shroff, Tesla AI
Harish Bahl, Smile Group
Harsh Jain, Dream11
Kirthiga Reddy, Verix
Lalit Keshre, Groww
Mahesh Sutar, Rippling
Manohar Paluri, Meta
Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz
Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
Micky Malka, Ribbit Capital
Miten Sampat, CRED
Mukesh Bansal, Nurix
Mukul Agrawal, Param Capital
Neeraj Arora, General Catalyst
Nick Talwar, Rohati Capital
Paras Chopra, Lossfunk
Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Labs
Rahul Khanna, Trifecta Capital
Ritesh Arora, Browserstack
Ronnie Screwvala, Upgrad
Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon
Shailendra Singh, PeakXV Partners
Sharad Sanghi, Neysa
Srikanth Velamakanni, Fractal
Sriram Rajamani, Microsoft Research
Steve Jang, Kindred Ventures
Varun Mayya, Aeos Labs
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm
Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
Vishal Misra, Columbia

Projects

We run India's largest Generative AI community spanning 15k+ technical practitioners. Request here to join.

Activate Signal is our media platform focused on crafting India's AI narrative. Signal aims to be not another VC brand propaganda, but rather the defining voice of what's happening in AI in India.

What we believe in

Velocity : Imagine the fastest you have worked & shipped things before, and multiply it by 10x. Companies are getting created in days now, not even weeks.

Depth : Everyone knows everything now, the only way to achieve excellence is being an expert on your domain. It can be an industry vertical or a research topic or a particular piece of tech. You need to know more about it than 99.99% of everyone else in the world.

Taste : Intuition has never commanded more premium than before. There is no way to develop this other than surround yourself with incredible people who have it. The finer details and small decisions make or break.

Influence : Attention is all you need, truly. The game is being played at just a whole new level now. Think Cluely, Sydney Sweeney x AE, Astronomer x Gwyneth. This muscle needs to be in the DNA of every org.

Value Stack

Key Drivers for India

AI Applications

Consumer, Prosumer, Enterprise

• Transformation of the $250B BPO industry with AI-led services

• AI experts tailored to local needs (Doctor, Teacher, Farmer)

• AI-native solutions for large local industry - Fintech, E-Commerce, Healthcare

Infrastructure Tooling

LLMOps, Data Ops, Evals

• Best in class developer talent driven by 500M+ user base consumer apps

• Data labeling, quality & annotation platforms powered by abundant skilled labor

• Enterprise-grade observability, born from decades of IT Services expertise

Foundation Models

LLMs, SLMs, Multimodal

• Sovereign LLMs adapted for local languages and government needs

• Building speech-first models for the world's largest voice search market

• Specific industry niche models in defence, biotech, logistics, etc.

Accelerated Compute

AI Cloud, AI Hardware

• Semiconductor design talent for custom silicon in AI workloads

• Training vs. inference specialization optimized to local pricing

• Energy efficiency & supply chain resilience for geopolitical gains

Physical Infrastructure

Data Centers, Power, Cooling

• Sovereign data center capacity & localization (regulatory)

• Advanced cooling & energy efficiency innovations tailored for India

• Fiber network build outs for low-latency connectivity

Portfolio

Activate is currently in the process of making our first few investments.

Our past portfolio as angels & backers includes: Composio, Park+, Rapidclaims, Sri Mandir, Spry, Smallest AI, Seekho, Emergent, Eka Care, Unacademy, ZuAI, Spendflo, Rocket.new, Truva, Boba Bhai.

Partners

Activate has exclusive partnerships with the world's leading AI labs and companies. From day one, every portfolio company receives up to $1M in credits & benefits, along with early access to new models, beta features, and dedicated co-building support.