Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Southeast Asia’s early-stage start-up scale-up programme ‘Surge’ has announced its seventh cohort. The new batch (Surge 07) includes 15 start-ups and 37 founders, who are tackling myriad issues from climate change and decarbonisation to agriculture and finance, and more.
“Nearly half of our Surge 07 companies were pre-launch when we partnered with them. Some are second or third time founders, and others founded their start-up right out of college,” Sequoia Surge said in a statement. “What’s more, one-third of the startups in this cohort have at least one female founder,” it added.
The 15 start-ups that made it to the latest cohort include:
Attentive (a vertical SaaS company building a sales automation platform),
Beam (a one-click checkout solution for frictionless payment experience for sellers and shoppers),
Boxs (a design-to-build automation platform for architects, interior designers and construction companies),
BuyerAssist (helps B2B revenue teams win enterprise deals and grow customer accounts),
ClearFeed (collaboration platform that uses AI models to enable natural language ticketing),
Gan (uses AI to democratise personalised video creation),
Hatica (provides engineering managers and leaders tools and insights to build great teams),
Metaschool (platform for developers to learn, build and ship dApps for the Web3 ecosystem),
PixCap (animation platform for users with no design experience to create 3D illustrations),
Pratech Brands (helps Indian consumers upgrade their quality of life through better home and health products),
Semaai (building a full-stack tech solution for Indonesia’s agriculture sector),
TrueFoundry (developer platform that enables startups to deploy and monitor machine learning models),
Unravel Carbon (enterprise software company that helps companies track and reduce their carbon emissions),
Whiz (building Indonesia’s first fintech company for teenagers),
and an unnamed “stealth” company in the travel space.
Highlighting the diversity and experience in Surge 07, Sequoia said, “The cohort includes the former CFO of Nykaa, Uber’s first engineers in India, software engineers who helped build Apache Hive, an aerospace engineer turned fintech founder, and machine learning engineers who worked on conversational AI at Facebook.
Surge: Journey so far
Surge 07 is the first time since Surge 02 in 2019 that Sequoia has unveiled the cohort offline. “During Covid we went entirely online, and while we did manage to wrap Surge 06 in person, this launch marks a new beginning of Surge’s hybrid programme, where we’ll meet at key points during the 16-weeks,” the venture firm explained.
Surge was launched in early 2019, with the express purpose of accelerating tech-led innovation in emerging markets like India and South Asia. In a little over three years, ‘Surge Ahead’ has covered 281 founders from 127 start-ups across 16 sectors.
Surge start-ups have cumulatively raised over $1.7 billion in follow-on funding so far, with more than 60 per cent of companies from the first five cohorts going on to raise Series A rounds and beyond.
Rajan Anandan, MD, Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, and Surge, stated, “We continue to be deeply impressed by the ambition and diversity of ideas, as well as the caliber of founders with each cohort. Surge 07 is no exception.”