Activate and NVIDIA Launch Partnership to Accelerate AI Startup Development

Activate, a venture capital fund that specialises in early-stage AI startups, has formed a partnership with NVIDIA to offer founders access to the global chipmaking giant's development resources. The statement was made in New Delhi during the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026', which is now underway. An artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Haptik's former CEO and cofounder, Aakrit Vaish, established Activate to invest in businesses during their "inception" phase. Startups who win funding from Activate will have access to NVIDIA's Nemotron family of open-source models for constructing agentic AI platforms, as well as mentorship from NVIDIA.

How Activate and NVIDIA’s JV will Help Startups?

The open parameters, weights, training data, and recipes of Nemotron will be available to the founders. To facilitate the rapid deployment of AI agents, these scripts are frequently pre-configured and available for users to download and execute independently. Structured learning tools and resources, reference workflows, computational and ecosystem development, and hands-on technical training sessions will supplement the model access. As a result, developers will have more standard methods for deploying, optimising, and scaling applications on NVIDIA's GPUs.

In addition to assisting Activate in finding possible founders and teams nationwide, NVIDIA will also help organise developer enablement and community-building initiatives. According to Tobias Halloran, head of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA, India's AI startup ecosystem is ready to take off, thanks to the country's abundance of brilliant minds and their desire to make a splash on a global scale. NVIDIA is helping companies speed up this trend by providing founders with resources like scalable AI infrastructure, accelerated computing, and startup programs like NVIDIA Inception and the NVIDIA VC Alliance.

Brief Background of Activate

Activate was introduced by Vaish in December of last year. He was also an advisor for the IndiaAI Mission, alongside Pratyush Choudhary, an ex-partner of Together Fund. Choudhary had previously invested in AI ventures such as Privado, DhiWise, and Protecto.ai. The expected total fund corpus is $75 million, and the ticket size of Activate's investments is $500K to $3 million. Among the many individuals who have joined the fund as limited partners are Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity, Ronnie Screwvala of upGrad, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Srikanth Velamakanni of Fractal, and Shailendra Singh of Peak XV Partners.

NVIDIA at India AI Impact Summit 2026

At the current India AI Impact Summit, NVIDIA—a founding member of the India Deeptech Alliance—forged numerous alliances to bolster the developing AI ecosystem in the nation. Among the noteworthy announcements was a partnership with construction powerhouse L&T to establish AI data centre infrastructure in India on a gigawatt scale. This will pave the way for widespread use of AI in manufacturing. In addition, NVIDIA has partnered with startups to develop and expand AI tools through ecosystem partnerships.