Surge, the Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s rapid-scale up programme, has announced the launch of its seventh cohort comprising 37 founders across 15 early-stage startups.
About half of the Surge 07 companies were in the pre-launch stage prior to the Surge partnership. A few of the startups in the cohort are run by second or third-time entrepreneurs. Also, the startups have at least one female founder in one-third of them.
The cohort includes Sachin Parikh, the former chief financial officer of Nykaa, the first engineers of Uber in India, software developers from Apache Hive, a former aerospace engineer who founded a finance company, and data scientists who worked on Facebook's conversational AI project, Surge said in a release.
“Our founders bring with them a wealth of experience and creativity, and we believe that these dreamers, innovators and category creators have the potential to change the future of our region and the world,” said Rajan Anandan, managing director, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, and Surge.
Surge offers company-building workshops, a global curriculum, up to $3 million in seed funding, and the support of a network of mentors and entrepreneurs. The programme's objective is to provide mentorship and access to funding to early-stage startups in Southeast Asia and India.
With the addition of the seventh cohort, the Surge community now includes 281 founders from 127 firms operating across 16 industries. So far, Surge startups have raised over US$1.7 billion in follow-on funding rounds.
The seventh cohort includes vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Attentive, fintech platform enabling frictionless payment experience for sellers and shoppers Beam, design-to-build automation platform Boxs, B2B software provider BuyerAssist, collaboration platform ClearFeed, video creation platform Gan, productivity tool Hatica, and Web3-focussed learning platform Metaschool.
Other startups in the cohort are animation platform PixCap, seller of home and health products Pratech Brands, agritech platform Semaai, developer platform TrueFoundry, enterprise software company Unravel Carbon, and fintech company for teenagers Whiz.
The name of the 15th startup in the seventh cohort wasn’t revealed by the accelerator at the moment as the travel-related startup is currently in stealth.
