NVIDIA has entered into a multi-year partnership with Activate, a venture firm focused on AI and early-stage investments, to discover and support the next generation of AI startups in India, enhancing its strategy to develop a local innovation pipeline integrated with its computing ecosystem.
This collaboration, announced at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, will merge NVIDIA’s global Inception startup programme with Activate’s approach to supporting founders before the formal establishment of a company, emphasising the incubation of ideas into products.
As part of this partnership, startups backed by Activate will be integrated into NVIDIA’s global inception programme, which offers access to developer tools, technical training, computing resources, and support for market entry, according to Aakrit Vaish, Founder of Activate, in an interview with The Economic Times.
“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.
Through this partnership, startups supported by Activate will have the opportunity to use NVIDIA’s development suite, which includes technical training, computing resources, reference workflows, and deployment assistance, as well as the Nemotron series of open AI models and NVIDIA NIM microservices to enhance application development and scalability.
“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—helping startups scale faster and build for global markets,” Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA, reportedly said.
The partnership enhances NVIDIA’s expanding involvement in India's AI sector, where it has collaborated with venture capital firms such as Peak XV Partners, Accel, Nexus Venture Partners, and Elevation Capital to support emerging AI startups.
Activate, founded in December 2025 by Vaish and Pratyush Choudhury, the former principal investor at Together Fund, manages a $75-million fund that supports technical founders from the very beginning, often even before the formal establishment of the company.
The fund intends to invest between $500,000 and $3 million in each startup it supports.
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