Meet the 15 startups that are part of Sequoia Surge’s seventh cohort

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Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up programme Surge launched its seventh cohort, where it has invested in 15 early-stage startups with total funding of $41 million. What are these 15 startups that have got Sequoia’s attention? 

• Attentive: Vertical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup that’s building a sales automation platform for outdoor services contractors. Attentive mainly captures the $200 billion market in the US. It operates in services like landscaping, paving, snow removal and pest control, powered by over 600,000 contractors. The company was founded as a service provider in 2017 by Sarthak Vijay and Shiva Dhawan and launched as a SaaS Platform in 2021.

• Beam: Fintech platform that offers checkout solutions for sellers and shoppers in Southeast Asia. Beam has partnered with a number of local and global brands and their exclusive distributors. The startup was founded in 2019 in Bangkok by Mike Chinakrit Piamchon, Nattapat Chaimanowong, and Win Vareekasem.

• Boxs: It is a design-to-build automation platform for architects, interior designers and construction companies. Boxs was founded in 2021 by Satheesh Ramdass and Vikram Venkatesan in Chennai. The founders studied together at the College of Engineering, Guindy.

• BuyerAssist: It is a customer collaboration platform that enables enterprise revenue teams to effectively collaborate with B2B buyers and transparently communicate with all parties involved in the process to retain stakeholders and onboard new clients. BuyerAssist was established in San Francisco in October 2020 by Amit Dugar, Shankar Ganapathy and Shyam HN.

• ClearFeed: It is a collaboration platform that uses AI models to enable natural language ticketing on Slack and Microsoft Teams and provides connectivity to backend ticketing tools like Zendesk, Salesforce and Freshdesk so that support and IT teams can work from their preferred tool while servicing customers and employees via Slack. ClearFeed was founded in September 2021 in Bangalore by Ankit Jain, Joydeep Sen Sarma and Lalit Indoria.

• Gan: It is a personalised video creation platform where the company leverages AI to create customised videos at scale, helping brands to build personal connections with their customers. Gan was founded in March 2021 by Suvrat Bhooshan and is headquartered in New Delhi.

• Hatica: This SaaS startup helps an organisation’s engineering teams with software development analytics, alongside team productivity and workflow insights, to drive engineering excellence, alignment and well-being. Hatica works by connecting with all the apps used by developers to gather work done, from GitHub and Jira, to CI/CD and incident management systems, to automatically build end-to-end process visibility and activity dashboards. It was founded in June 2020 by Haritabh Singh and Naomi Chopra in San Francisco.

• Metaschool: Headquartered in Singapore, Metaschool produces engaging project tutorials designed to help developers start from the basics and eventually build projects, such as an NFT (Non-fungible Tokens)  marketplace, a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation)  for a specific community, or a decentralized social media platform. It was founded in January 2022 by Fatima Rizwan. 

• PixCap: It is an animation platform that allows users with no design experience to create animations for 3D illustrations, games, and designs. The platform includes free 3D templates and animations and allows users to export images, videos and 3D industry-standard formats. PixCap, headquartered in Singapore, was founded by CJ Looi and Cyril Nie in April 2020.

• Pratech Brands: An online retailer for health and home needs, Pratech offers easy-to-use products with a focus on convenience and functionality. Its latest launch, the Tesora brand range, includes bladeless fans, air fryers, ovens, kettles, and more that serve as statement pieces for the modern home. It was founded in Mumbai in 2021 by Anvi Shah, Neehar Modi and Sachin Parikh.

• Semaai: An AgriTech startup that is building a full-stack tech solution for Indonesia’s agricultural sector. Semaai offers a comprehensive platform for the agriculture community, with an initial focus on farming inputs, such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and farming tools. The startup was founded in April 2021 by Muhammad Yoga Anindito, Abhishek Gupta and Gaurav Batra.

• TrueFoundry: A developer platform that enables startups to deploy and monitor machine learning (ML) models at the speed of big tech companies. TrueFoundry aims to automate the repetitive parts of the machine learning (ML) pipeline around infrastructure and deployments so data scientists and ML engineers can focus on the more creative parts. TrueFoundry was founded in June 2021 by Abhishek Choudhary, Anuraag Gutgutia and Nikunj Bajaj, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

• Unravel Carbon: It is an enterprise software company that helps companies track and reduce their carbon emissions. The platform converts any company’s accounting data into full supply chain carbon data, generates customised climate pathways to net zero with climate solutions, and auto-populates regulatory disclosure reports. Unravel Carbon was founded in September 2021 by Grace Sai and Marc Allen and is headquartered in Singapore.

• Whiz: Fintech startup designed for teenagers, Whiz helps open their first financial account with an app, makes purchases through a QR payments system that’s widely accepted in Indonesia, and offers learning options on budgeting and saving. Additionally, parents and teens can jointly manage their allowance and track chores on the Whiz app. Whiz was founded in Jakarta in January 2022 by Agnes Wirya Lie, Dominic Sumarli and Frederick Widjaja.