Sequoia's Surge announces its seventh cohort with 15 Indian and Southeast Asian startups

Surge, Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up programme, has launched its seventh cohort, featuring 37 founders across 15 early-stage startups.

In its official blog, Sequoia India Capital said, "Founders in this cohort 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 agriculturInfoEdgee sector; enabling the next 10 million developers to enter the Web3 space, and much more."

Many Surge 07 founders have extensive experience in their sectors. 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, according to the company.

About one-third of the startups in this cohort have at least one female founder. 

With the seventh cohort, the Surge community now includes 281 founders from 127 startups across 16 sectors. Surge startups have also so far collectively raised over $1.7 billion in follow-on funding, with over 60% of companies from the first five cohorts raising their series A and beyond. 

Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, and Surge, said, “We continue to be deeply impressed by the ambition and diversity of ideas, as well as the calibre of founders with each cohort. 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."

Surge 07 is currently in progress and founders are going through a rigorous 16-week hybrid programme. Past speakers and mentors in the program include Amrish Rau (Pine Labs), 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).

The companies are:

Attentive: It is a vertical SaaS (software-as-a-Service) company that’s building a sales automation platform for America’s outdoor services contractors.  

Beam: This startup is building a one-click checkout solution that enables a frictionless payment experience for sellers and shoppers in Southeast Asia.

Boxs: It is a design-to-build automation platform for architects, interior designers and construction companies.

BuyerAssist: The startup helps B2B revenue teams win enterprise deals and grow customer accounts using Mutual Success Plans (MSPs) to align and collaborate effectively with their buyers throughout the journey. 

ClearFeed: It is a collaboration platform that uses AI models to enable natural language ticketing on Slack and Microsoft Teams, and provides seamless connectivity to backend ticketing tools like Zendesk, Salesforce and Freshdesk.

Gan: It is on a mission to democratise personalised video creation. The company leverages AI to create customised videos at scale, empowering brands to build personal connections with their customers. 

Hatica: In a world of distributed teams and SaaS sprawl, Hatica is on a mission to provide engineering managers and leaders with the visibility and insights to help them build productive and healthy engineering teams.

Metaschool: The startup makes it easy for developers to learn, build and ship dApps to prepare them for opportunities in the emerging Web3 ecosystem.

PixCap: It is an animation platform that allows users with no design experience to create animations for 3D illustrations, games, and designs.

Pratech Brands: It helps new-age Indian consumers upgrade their quality of life through better home and health products.

Semaai: The startup is building a full-stack tech solution for Indonesia's agriculture sector. It is on a mission to enhance the livelihood of millions of farmers and agri-retailers across the country.

TrueFoundry: It is a developer platform that enables startups to deploy and monitor machine learning (ML) models at the speed of big tech companies, in minutes or days instead of weeks or months.

Unravel Carbon:  It is an enterprise software company that helps companies track and reduce their carbon emissions. The company is on a mission to accelerate the participation of all companies, big and small, in the global fight against climate change.

Whiz: Indonesia’s first fintech company for teenagers, is on a mission to empower a new generation of financial whiz kids.

The last startup is a stealth mode startup in the travel space.