Aakrit VaishHaptik cofounder Aakrit Vaish’s early-stage venture firm Activate has announced a multi-year collaboration with Nvidia to support AI startups in India, with a focus on founders at the idea and pre-company stage.
Under the partnership, Activate-backed startups will be onboarded to Nvidia’s global inception programme, which supports startups with access to developer tools, technical training, compute resources and go-to-market support, Vaish told ET.
“Any time we invest in a company, the startup will get direct access to Nvidia teams and proprietary models. We will also have early access to certain product releases before they are launched publicly,” he said.
Vaish said the collaboration will help Indian AI startups build products for global markets. Nvidia’s solution architect team will co-build with the fund and founders, he added.
Founders will get access to Nvidia’s Nemotron family of open models, along with training data and reference workflows. Startups will also receive support to build and deploy applications using Nvidia GPUs and related software tools.
“India’s AI startup ecosystem is primed for acceleration, driven by exceptional technical talent and global ambition,” said Tobias Halloran, director of EMEAI startups and venture capital at Nvidia.
He said the company is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct access to computing, scalable AI infrastructure, and programmes like Nvidia Inception.
Launched in December 2025 by Vaish and Pratyush Choudhury, former principal investor at Together Fund, Activate’s $75-million fund focuses on working with technical founders from “day zero,” often before the company is formally set up.
The fund aims to invest between $500,000 and $3 million in each startup it backs.
Activate has India and US-based limited partners including Indian-origin billionaire Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Ashish Vaswani (Essential AI), Dhaval Shroff (Tesla AI) among several others focused on the AI ecosystem.
Vaish said many AI founders, especially those building AI agents or generative systems often get stuck or are unsure about technical decisions. “Through this partnership, they can directly lean on Nvidia experts who can give very pointed advice,” he explained, adding that founders will also know about Nvidia product releases in advance, helping them to adjust their product roadmaps accordingly.
For Nvidia, the upside is long term. “Ultimately Nvidia is a compute company,” Vaish said. If startups succeed and scale, they will raise more capital and spend more on compute. “Even if a small fraction of Activate-backed companies become large, they are likely to remain long-term customers of Nvidia’s infrastructure, making the partnership an ecosystem play rather than a short-term exercise,’ he added.
The announcement was made during the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
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