Aakrit Vaish is Advisor to the IndiaAI Mission, the country's $1.5 Billion sovereign program to help India achieve global AI leadership. Aakrit works with the Union Ministry of IT in India Electronics to help run the 7 pillars of the Mission, including Compute Capacity, Foundation Models, Datasets Platform, Startup Financing & more. Previously Aakrit founded Haptik in 2013, which over the past decade became a pioneer in the conversational AI industry and was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019 in India's largest AI M&A at the time. He also runs Peercheque, a venture capital firm investing seed capital in Indian startups across AI, Fintech, SaaS and D2C. He is Co-Chair of the Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM), a non-profit he co-founded to advance the startup tech ecosystem of the city. In 2023, Aakrit was named as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (YGL).