Pratyush Choudhury is changing how venture capital works. As the co-founder of Activate AI, India’s first fund dedicated to artificial intelligence, he is moving past traditional metrics of team and market. Instead, Choudhury spends his days working hands-on with frontier models. He burns through hundreds of millions of tokens daily, running experiments and implementing research papers to maintain a competitive edge. This technical fluency allows him to identify founders who build for durable problems rather than temporary capability gaps that disappear with the next model release.
Activate AI manages a $75 million fund and has already secured wins with startups like Sarvam and Emergent. Choudhury argues that the era of the business-only founder in AI is ending. He believes that without deep technical knowledge, investors cannot distinguish between genuine breakthroughs and minor product tweaks. His approach involves a global network of researchers and developers, ensuring he understands the second-order effects of new models emerging from the United States, Europe, and China.
Beyond personal intuition, Choudhury is a vocal proponent of India developing sovereign AI capabilities. He identifies compute and data access as the primary bottlenecks for the region. Because the current AI infrastructure relies heavily on foreign entities with shifting priorities, he views the domestic development of foundational technology as a strategic necessity. By investing heavily in firsthand experimentation and pushing for regional compute resources, Activate AI is positioning itself to capture value as the AI ecosystem becomes the baseline for the broader technology industry.