NVIDIA is deepening its India strategy by backing 25–30 AI startups through a partnership with early-stage venture firm Activate and its $75M debut fund. The collaboration gives founders early access to NVIDIA’s advanced computing platforms critical infrastructure for building and scaling AI products.
Activate’s backers include prominent tech leaders such as Vinod Khosla, Aravind Srinivas, Shailendra J Singh, and Vijay Shekhar Sharma adding strategic capital and ecosystem credibility to the initiative.
This move complements NVIDIA’s existing programs, including NVIDIA Inception, and partnerships across India’s deep tech ecosystem such as India Deep Tech Alliance, Accel, Blume Ventures, Premji Invest, and Celesta Capital.
Strategically, NVIDIA isn’t just selling GPUs it’s embedding itself at the foundation of India’s AI startup stack. By supporting founders at inception, it strengthens long-term platform dependency, developer loyalty, and ecosystem dominance.
With India’s AI market accelerating rapidly, NVIDIA’s early-stage positioning could secure durable competitive advantage turning infrastructure access into long-term market influence.
Overall, this is a classic platform play: invest early, power the ecosystem, and own the rails of India’s AI boom.
