Founders and developers will gain access to NVIDIA’s Nemotron family of open-source models for building agentic AI platforms
NVIDIA will also aid Activate in identifying high-potential founders and teams across the country and provide them with technical training and resources
Launched in December, Activate invests in early stage AI startups that need assistance in going from ideation to implementation
Early stage AI-startups focused venture capital fund Activate has partnered NVIDIA to provide founders with the global chipmaking giant’s pool of development resources. The announcement was made on the sidelines of the ongoing ‘India AI Impact Summit 2026’ in New Delhi.
Founded by Aakrit Vaish, the former CEO and cofounder of AI startup Haptik, Activate backs startups in their ‘inception’ or ideation stage. Through the partnership, the startups that receive funding from Activate will also gain mentorship from NVIDIA in addition to access for its Nemotron family of open-source models for building agentic AI platforms.
Founders will be able to use Nemotron’s open weights or parameters, training data and recipes, which are often pre-configured scripts that users can download and run on their own for faster deployment of AI agents. The model access will be complemented with structured learning tools and resources, reference workflows, hands-on technical training sessions, compute and ecosystem development.
This will allow developers to build, optimise and scale their solutions on NVIDIA’s GPUs using common deployment paths.
NVIDIA will also aid Activate in identifying potential founders and teams across the country, along with organising initiatives for developer enablement and community-building.
“India’s AI startup ecosystem is primed for acceleration, driven by exceptional technical talent and global ambition. NVIDIA is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct access to accelerated computing, scalable AI infrastructure, and programs like NVIDIA Inception for startups and the NVIDIA VC Alliance,” said Tobias Halloran, director of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA.
Activate was launched in December last year by Vaish, who was also an advisor for the IndiaAI Mission, along with ex-Together Fund partner Pratyush Choudhary, who earlier invested in AI startups like Privado, DhiWise, Protecto.ai, among others.
The ticket size of Activate’s investments ranges between $500K to $3 Mn, with the total fund corpus estimated at $75 Mn. Limited partners of the fund include Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas, upGrad’s Ronnie Screwvala, Khosla Ventures’ Vinod Khosla, Fractal’s Srikanth Velamakanni, Peak XV Partners’ Shailendra Singh, among others.
The ongoing India AI Impact Summit saw NVIDIA, which is a founding member of India Deeptech Alliancestrike multiple partnerships to support the country’s growing AI ecosystem. Some notable announcements included a joint venture with construction giant L&T to build gigawatt-scale AI data centre infrastructure in India that will enable large scale industrial adoption of AI, along with ecosystem partnerships with startups to build and scale AI tools.
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