Sequoia's Surge announces seventh cohort of 15 startups raising $41 million

Nearly half of the companies were pre-launch when Surge partnered with them.

Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up programme Surge has launched its seventh cohort, where it has invested in 15 early-stage Indian and Southeast Asian startups with total funding of $41 million.  

“Surge 07 is no exception. We have partnered with all of our companies at their earliest stage of company building, with nearly half of them still in pre-launch at the start of our partnerships,” said Rajan Anandan, managing director, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, and Surge. 

Surge 07 features founders who are tackling climate change with the first AI-powered decarbonisation platform in the Asia Pacific; helping people with no design experience create 3D animation anywhere in the world; allowing startups to build machine learning projects in minutes and days versus months; facilitating one-click checkouts in SEA; building Indonesia’s first fintech company for teenagers; building full-stack tech solutions for Indonesia's agriculture sector and those who are enabling the next 10 million developers to enter the Web3 space. 

According to Sequoia, the startups that are part of Surge 07 include vertical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firm Attentive; fintech Beam; automation platform Boxes; B2B revenue service firm BuyerAssist; AI-based collaboration platform ClearFeed; AI-based video creation platform Gan; and Saas firm Hatica. 

Fintech firm Whiz, Unravel Carbon, TrueFoundry, Semaai, Pratech Brands, PixCap and Meta school are also part of the Surge 07 cohort. 

Interestingly, the seventh cohort has focussed mostly on software and deep-tech firms and there is no investment in edtech or Direct-to-consumer (D2C) segments.

Despite a funding winter, venture capitalists (VCs) are taking more interest in SaaS (software as a service) companies as they are seen to be running leaner businesses than subsidy-heavy segments like consumer tech and fintech, say, industry insiders.

However, In January, Sequoia launched its sixth cohort with total funding of $60 million which had startups from SaaS, Dev Tools, cybersecurity, edtech, D2C, fintech, and agritech sectors.

“Surge has grown tremendously over the past three years, and with the seventh cohort, the community now includes 281 founders from 127 startups across 16 sectors,” the investment firm said in a media statement on August 22. 

“Founders are also increasingly targeting their business for a world stage. A majority of the companies are building for global markets from day one and targeting audiences beyond their headquarters, nearly half have a presence in US and European markets,” Anandan said. 

Nearly half of Surge 07 companies were pre-launch when Surge partnered with them. Some are second or third-time founders, and others founded their startups right out of college. 

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. What’s more, one-third of the startups in this cohort have at least one female founder.

Surge 07 is currently in progress and founders are going through a rigorous 16-week hybrid programme, the statement said. 

Past speakers and mentors in the programme include Amrish Rau (Pinelabs), Ashwini Asokan (vue.ai/Mad Street Den), Binny Bansal (Flipkart), Byju Raveendran (BYJU’S), Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Kunal Shah (CRED), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), Sanjeev Bikchandani (InfoEdge) and Vidit Aatrey (Meesho).