Surge, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up program, has on Monday launched its seventh cohort, featuring 37 accomplished founders across 15 early-stage startups.
Surge said in a statement it 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.
Surge startups have also collectively raised over $1.7 billion in follow-on funding, with over 60 percent of companies from the first five cohorts raising their series A and beyond.
Surge 07 founders are leveraging their deep expertise in technology and consumer insights to drive innovation in India, Southeast Asia and the world.
This includes founders who are tackling climate change with the first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered decarbonisation platform in 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 Southeast Asia (SEA); building Indonesia’s first fintech company for teenagers; building full-stack tech solutions for Indonesia’s agriculture sector; enabling the next 10 million developers to enter the Web3 space, and much more.
Meanwhile, 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 startup right out of college.
Many Surge 07 founders also have extensive experience in their sectors. The cohort includes the former Chief Financial Officer 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 artificial intelligence AI at Facebook.
It is also noted that one-third of the startups in this cohort have at least one female founder.
“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,
“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 07 is currently in progress and founders are going through a rigorous 16-week hybrid program.
Past speakers and mentors in the program include Siu Rui Quek (Carousell), William Tanuwijaya (Tokopedia/GoTo), Chatri Sityodtong (ONE Championship) and Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital).
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 United States and European markets.
Surge 07 Companies are:
1) Attentive – a vertical software as a service (SaaS) company that’s building a sales automation platform for America’s outdoor services contractors.
2) Beam – a startup that is building on a one-click checkout solution that enables a frictionless payment experience for sellers and shoppers in Southeast Asia.
3) Boxs – a design-to-build automation platform for architects, interior designers and construction companies.
4) BuyerAssist – a firm that helps business to business (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.
5) ClearFeed – 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.
6) Gan – a firm which 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.
7) Hatica – a firm which is on a mission to provide engineering managers and leaders with the visibility and insights to help them build productive and healthy engineering teams.
8) Metaschool – a firm that makes it easy for developers to learn, build and ship dApps to prepare them for opportunities in the emerging Web3 ecosystem.
9) PixCap – an animation platform that allows users with no design experience to create animations for 3D illustrations, games, and designs.
10) Pratech Brands – a startup which helps new age Indian consumers upgrade their quality of life through better home and health products.
11) Semaai – a firm which is building a full-stack tech solution for Indonesia’s agriculture sector, and is on a mission to enhance the livelihood of millions of farmers and agri-retailers across the country.
12) TrueFoundry – 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.
13) Unravel Carbon – 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.
14) Whiz – Indonesia’s first fintech company for teenagers which is on a mission to empower a new generation of financial whiz kids.
15) Stealth – a company in the travel space.