Activating AI in India
Mumbai, India
Joined February 2009
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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 it comes together in my next act.
Introducing Activate: India’s AI Venture Fund.
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-$3M at inception.
With @177pc, the one & only person in the world I'd want to do this with.
It starts here. It starts now. It's time to Activate.
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
Earlier this week, Activate hosted our first-ever San Francisco gathering alongside our partners @KindredVentures! We brought together ~100 founders & investors along the India-US corridor under one roof for an insightful session to explore the evolving cross-border AI landscape.
We covered Tanay Kothari's (@tankots) journey building @WisprFlow from New Delhi to San Francisco followed by panel insights from Deedy Das (@deedydas), Neeraj Arora (@neerajarora) & Satyan Gajwani (@satyan) that was moderated by Aakrit Vaish (@aakrit) on building along the bridge. The evening also featured an emerging class of Indian founders: Soham Ganatra (@GanatraSoham), Deshraj Yadav (@deshrajdry) & Sudhanshu Mishra (@snmishra311) who are building groundbreaking AI startups in the US, the panel was moderated by Steve Jang (@stevejang).
Huge thank you to our incredible speakers, founders, and investors for making it an evening to remember!
It's amazing to see good people come together towards such an incredible mission.
I've known both @kevinweil and @manohar_paluri in different ways for a few years. Couldn't be more excited for them to join hands.
And thanks for having me as a small angel along the way :)
💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.
We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.
I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
We are honored to host Rahul Patil (CTO, @AnthropicAI) on his visit to India! 🇮🇳
From leading global payment infrastructure to scaling compute and inference currently at Anthropic, Rahul is one of the top experts in production-grade AI systems.
Join us for an off-the-record Mixture of Experts gathering hosted by Pratyush Choudhury (@177pc).
Space is strictly limited. Request a spot here: luma.com/g6hcvhe2
Okay yeah confirmed anti-porfolio 😅
Fastest company ever to $1b annualized revenue
Nope it’s not Higgsfield or Cursor or Cognition.
Met a data company yesterday that did 0 revenue in November 2025 and 80m “in month revenue” in September 2026. They will hit $1b annualized from 11 months of being started. They are still under the radar so I can’t share who they are. Hopefully soon, with their permission.
I don’t make the rules.
This week we take our flagship Mixture of Experts series to GIFT City in Gujarat, the gateway for global capital in India.
On October 7, I'll be in conversation with Shri K. Rajaraman, Chairperson IFSCA, Dr. Dipesh Shah, ED, Joseph Joshy, and Som Dutt, PhD of Indian AI Research Organization (IAIRO), on where AI meets finance, regulation and what India builds next.
Some of the best conversations happen when regulators, founders and investors are in the same room, and GIFT City is the place where those lines are being drawn.
RSVP: luma.com/q9znu0pz
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
Big moment for @ElevenLabs — now valued at $22B.
When we partnered with ElevenLabs earlier this year, we believed voice would become one of the defining interfaces of the AI era and that India would be one of the most important markets for it.
That conviction has only gotten stronger.
India is already ElevenLabs’ second-largest market. We’re proud to be both investors and their strategic partners on the ground, helping take this technology across the country.
Congratulations to Mati, Piotr, Karthik and the entire ElevenLabs team. What they’ve built in such a short time is extraordinary! Still early 🚀
elevenlabs.io/blog/tender-22…
@mati @dabkowski_piotr @aakrit @177pc @soaibgrewal
A few weeks ago at the Global Fintech Fest, I sat down with @harshilmathur, Co-Founder & CEO of Razorpay, to talk about something I’ve been particularly curious about: what does it actually mean to turn a fintech giant into an AI company?
@Razorpay has quietly been doing some fascinating work. Most recently, they announced Vulcan, a foundation model for payments, built from scratch in India to improve fraud detection. And Harshil himself has been one of the more AI-pilled CEOs I’ve come across in the country, hands-on building agents and studying the craft.
We went deep into how they’re building with AI, what it changes across payments, and how he thinks about the technology from first principles.
One of the highest-quality technical conversations I’ve had with a CEO in India.🎙️
@ActivateSignal
Beast mode 🚀
See you all at ElevenLabs India summit next week!
We just closed an employee tender offer which values @ElevenLabs at $22BN, up 2x from our Series D in February. The tender was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price.
A few words on how we got here ↓
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
“Instinct for India” ≠ a conversational WhatsApp agent
I keep seeing the two confused in pitches. WhatsApp is a sensible interface. What interests me about a personal agent is that the state of my life survives the conversation: what I’m trying to do, what I’ve authorised, what’s changed & what’s unfinished
If an important meeting gets cancelled, does it remember why it mattered, find another slot & follow through within the permissions I gave it? Or do I have to brief it all over again?
The same test applies in other categories like personal finance/quick-commerce/services. Research & price alerts can be useful. The harder product remembers why I bought, what would change my mind & connects new information to that context. It follows through on agreed next steps, asks for approval where needed & checks what actually happened
That depth matters commercially. Otherwise, you’re likely squeezed b/w the broker that already has my portfolio/card/spending history & the horizontal agent competing to understand the rest of my life
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
Aakrit Vaish, former IndiaAI Mission advisor and Haptik founder, launched Activate in September last year as a the first venture firm dedicated to AI startups.
A year later, the firm has managed to raise $85 mn for its early stage fund which has already backed seven startups leveraging AI in biotech, e-commerce, legal and accounting services.
Along with it, the firm has raised a separate $20 mn which it has invested in several global startups in the voice AI space - San Francisco based Wispr Flow (last valued at $2 bn) and London-based Elevenlabs (last valued at $11 bn).
In addition, it also invested in Sarvam’s latest funding round.
Activate is seeing a ramp up in AI dealflow now, after evaluating 400 startups in the first half of 2026.
“I want the Deepinder Goyal of AI to come and say that I want to take money from Activate.”
Read more 👇
thearcweb.com/article/activa…
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
🚨Early-stage deal activity in artificial intelligence (AI) in India is at an all-time high as venture capital investors across the board ramp up their exposure to the sector, according to Aakrit Vaish, founder of AI-focused venture capital firm Activate.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, shortly after the fund's final close of a Rs 1,000 crore ($105 million) AI-focused fund last week, Vaish said investors are backing companies across the AI ecosystem -- from foundation model labs and AI infrastructure to deeptech and AI services.
Moneycontrol was the first to report in September 2025 that Vaish and Choudhury were raising a new $75 million AI-focused fund.
“It's very clear that we are seeing founders in two very clear cohorts. The first is the super early-stage, very hungry founder -- these are largely building deeptech AI or infra, or they're building something that is completely whacked and out of the world,” @aakrit said.
“The second type is seasoned corporate executives from firms such as EY, KPMG, Infosys, among others, leaving and building AI services companies.
With @Goenka_Tushar1
moneycontrol.com/news/busine…
Hard disagree with my buddy.
Like with most things, it depends. I too hate "networking" randomly, but some of my most alpha relationships have developed at events I wasn't going to attend.
The barbell applies here as well. Either go to really small curated bespoke gatherings, or to the largest mega shows of the year where everyone will be there.
The middle is the most unproductive way to achieve anything, events or life in general.
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
#AIWithMC | Early-stage AI deal activity at an all-time high: Activate founder Aakrit Vaish
The fund's first close marks another step-up in investor appetite for AI in India, as capital increasingly flows towards companies building foundational technology, infrastructure and applications around the AI stack, he told Moneycontrol.
@Goenka_Tushar1 and @chandrarsrikant bring in details:
moneycontrol.com/news/busine…
Over the past few weeks, close to 75% of my digital interactions have moved to Conversational UI. I find myself rarely opening email, spreadsheets, slides or the laptop in general.
The rise of Instinct, Grok Bot, Town together with the advancements in Astra & Fable, feels like this is the start of the Consumer AI wave.
Anyone building in Consumer Tech in India should take a step back and reassess what this means, in a world where gradually people will just get used to texting on WhatsApp rather than clicking through apps.
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
A milestone for Activate. Day one for what comes next. 🇮🇳
Today, we’re announcing the final close of our debut fund, building a $105M (~₹1,000 crore) investment platform dedicated to India’s AI opportunity, less than a year after launching.
Activate was built around a simple belief: India isn’t behind in AI, its simply early.
Our ambition is to build more than a venture fund: a platform that brings together capital, founders, talent, research, enterprises and the global AI leaders to help build India's AI ecosystem.
In our first nine months, we’ve made 10 investments across Inception and Global Growth. Thank you to our founders, LPs, partners and the broader AI community for believing in this mission.
India’s AI moment is just beginning.
Read the full story in The Economic Times → economictimes.indiatimes.com…
🤖 Made with AI
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
Mixture of Experts is heading to Chennai.
Some of India’s most consequential work in AI and deep tech is being shaped at IIT Madras, and three of the people leading it will join us at Mixture of Experts, Chennai.
Prof. Mitesh Khapra leads AI4Bharat, where his team builds widely used open-source datasets, models, and tools for Indian-language AI. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Digital India Bhashini Mission’s Data Management Unit and is associated with Bodhan AI, a Ministry of Education Centre of Excellence building open digital public infrastructure for education.
Prof. Balaraman Ravindran brings more than three decades of work in reinforcement learning and responsible AI. He heads IIT Madras’ Department of Data Science and AI, is the founding head of WSAI, RBCDSAI, and CeRAI, and is an elected Fellow of AAAI and INAE. His work also extends to shaping AI governance in India and internationally.
Prof. Satyanarayanan Seshadri works at the intersection of research, entrepreneurship, and decarbonisation. He heads IIT Madras’ School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and its Energy Consortium, and has built deep-tech ventures translating research into industrial energy solutions.
Moderated by Pratyush and Aakrit, the conversation will explore their work, recent breakthroughs, and the questions shaping what comes next.
Sep 17, 2026 | 5:00 PM Onwards | RSVP here - luma.com/uqm4mp6m
If you think someone belongs in the room, tag them below.
Aakrit Vaish retweeted
this was a fun after party. everyone who is long India was there.
What. A. Night. 🔥
Last night, Activate hosted the official AI Sundowner of Global FinTech Fest, together with Anthropic and AWS.
The energy was incredible and hearing so many people tell us it was one of the best nights of the week made it even more special.
But what really made the evening was the room.
AI founders and fintech leaders. VCs and enterprise CXOs. Regulators and policymakers. Journalists and creators. Some of the people building the next generation of companies, alongside the people shaping the industries they’re going to transform.
An unusually eclectic mix and exactly the kind of room we love bringing together at Activate.
There’s an incredible amount of momentum around AI in India right now. Last night felt like a small glimpse of that energy coming together in one place.
Thank you to our partners Anthropic and AWS, and to everyone who came and made the night what it was.
@aakrit @177pc @soaibgrewal @GffFintechfest @miten @AmitabhN @nixxin @ishaanpreet @ku1deep @vishwaspatel
