Aakrit Vaish

Aakrit Vaish is a prominent AI entrepreneur and investor based in Mumbai, India. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He began his career in San Francisco as the 12th employee at Flurry, a mobile analytics and monetization startup, where he helped grow the business from zero to $100 million in revenue before the company was acquired by Yahoo in 2014 for approximately $280-$300 million. At Flurry, Vaish established the India office and ran global business operations, gaining deep experience in scaling technology companies across markets.

In 2013, Vaish co-founded Haptik with Swapan Rajdev, building it into one of the world's largest conversational AI platforms. The company grew to process nearly 100 million users annually, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Singapore, serving enterprise clients including KFC, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Oyo Rooms, Kotak Life, and Dream11. In 2019, Reliance Industries made a strategic investment of approximately $100 million in Haptik -- at the time, the largest AI acquisition in Asia. Vaish led Haptik as CEO for over a decade before stepping down in February 2025, handing the reins to Ahshad Jussawalla while continuing to serve on the board.

Beyond his entrepreneurial work, Vaish has been deeply engaged in India's AI ecosystem. He served as a full-time Advisor to the Government of India on the National AI Mission (IndiaAI), where he helped architect sovereign LLM policy. He is co-chair of the Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM) and organized MumbaiHacks, one of India's largest generative AI hackathons. He was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2023 and has appeared on the Entrepreneur 35 Under 35 and Business World 40 Under 40 lists.

Vaish invests at the intersection of AI, technology, and consumer-facing businesses. Through Peercheque, an early-stage investment firm he co-founded with Miten Sampat, he has written angel checks in over 80 companies over the past decade, focusing on Consumer Internet, SaaS, and Direct-to-Consumer brands.

In December 2025, Vaish co-launched Activate alongside Pratyush Choudhury (former principal at Together Fund), a $75 million venture fund focused exclusively on backing early-stage AI founders in India. Activate invests at inception -- including at the ideation stage -- with check sizes ranging from $500K to $3M. The fund targets AI-native startups across AI applications, foundational models, physical AI infrastructure, and allied verticals. Activate's thesis is rooted in the belief that India can be a global hub for AI innovation, and the fund aims to provide not just capital but deep technical and operational support to founders.

The fund's LP base reflects its AI-native positioning: backers include Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Ashish Vaswani (Essential AI, co-inventor of the Transformer architecture), Dhaval Shroff (Tesla AI), Manohar Paluri (VP of AI at Meta), Shyamal Anadkat (OpenAI), Shailendra Singh (Peak XV Partners), Srikanth Velamakanni (Fractal), and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm).