Activate Partners with NVIDIA to Support Early-Stage AI Startups

Early-stage venture fund Activate has reportedly signed a multi-year partnership with NVIDIA to support artificial intelligence startups in India. The announcement was made at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi. 

The collaboration links Activate’s early-stage funding model with NVIDIA’s developer tools and computing infrastructure. It is aimed at founders working at the idea or pre-incorporation stage. 

Access to Development Tools 

Under the arrangement, startups backed by Activate will be given access to NVIDIA’s Nemotron family of open models. This includes model weights, training datasets, and pre-configured scripts that can be used to build AI agents and applications. 

Founders will also be able to use NVIDIA NIM microservices, along with reference workflows and technical documentation. The support package includes structured training sessions and access to GPU compute for development and testing. 

Applications developed through the programme are expected to run on NVIDIA’s hardware systems and software stack. 

Activate’s Investment Model 

Activate was launched in December last year by Aakrit Vaish, former co-founder and chief executive of Haptik, and Pratyush Choudhary, previously with Together Fund. The fund works with technical founders at the inception stage, often before a company is formally set up. 

Investment ticket sizes range between $500,000 and $3 million. The total corpus stands at $75 million. Limited partners include Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity, Ronnie Screwvala of upGrad, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Srikanth Velamakanni of Fractal and Shailendra Singh of Peak XV Partners. 

Broader Engagement 

As part of the agreement, NVIDIA will help identify founders and teams across the country and support developer-focused initiatives. 

At the same summit, NVIDIA also announced a joint venture with Larsen & Toubro (L&T) to build gigawatt-scale AI data centre infrastructure in India. 

Read More: NPCI Partners with NVIDIA to Build a Sovereign AI Model for UPI: What Does it Mean for You? 

Conclusion 

The partnership connects early-stage AI funding with access to NVIDIA’s models and computing infrastructure. It was announced at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi. 

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