Surge, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up program for early-stage startups, has launched its eighth cohort, featuring 30 inspiring founders across twelve companies.

Surge said in a statement that Surge 08 includes startups that are building futuristic products across climate tech, artificial intelligence (AI), the metaverse, digital health, new consumer brands and new models of e-commerce.

Surge’s curated community of startups now includes eight cohorts, 300+ founders and 130+ startups across 16+ sectors.

According to the statement, half of Surge 08 startups have at least one female founder, including two medical doctors from Indonesia who are leveraging technology to democratise access to health and wellness services and an AI and natural language processing PhD holder focused on AI in healthcare.

Surge 08 also includes two health tech companies using AI to improve insurance and medical imaging, two climate-tech companies, a metaverse gaming platform for GenZ, an AI company that’s worked with NASA, as well as three exciting consumer companies that are building new-age brands in the home decor, food and wedding sectors.

“Surge 08 founders are building next-gen products and businesses that have the potential to revolutionise their sectors over the next decade,

“These diverse set of founders each bring with them unique experiences and expertise to create ambitious and differentiated products and platforms to the problems they are tackling – and we are excited to be a part of their early company-building journeys,” said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, and Surge.

According to the statement, many founders are building for global markets from day one, and half of the startups in Surge 08 are looking to expand into the United States, Europe and Canada.

Surge 08 is currently in progress and the founders are going through a 16-week hybrid program focused on company building.

Past speakers and mentors in the program include William Tanuwijaya (Tokopedia/GoTo), Siu Rui Quek (Carousell), Chatri Sityodtong (ONE Championship) and Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital).

Surge 08 Companies and Founders:

1) Arintra
Nitesh Shroff and Preeti Bhargava
Arintra is an AI-powered autonomous medical coding platform that helps United States hospitals get paid better and faster by automating their insurance claims submission.

2) AltWorld
Alok Maurya, Saurabh Maheshwari, Subham Kumar Boundia
AltWorld is a metaverse gaming platform that allows GenZ gamers to create custom 3D worlds and games easily, and connects these worlds to offer an immersive social gaming experience.

3) Bifrost
Aravind Satkunasingam Kandiah and Charles Wong Zheng Xun
Bifrost builds virtual worlds and synthetic datasets that artificial intelligence teams can use to train AI models for applications in areas such as gaming, the metaverse, mobility, robotics, space, and defence.

4) Calyx Global
Donna Lee and Duncan van Bergen
Calyx Global helps businesses choose better carbon credits with rigorous and independent carbon credit ratings.

5) Diri Care
Armand Amadeus, Christian Suwarna and Deviana Himawan
Diri Care is a consumer-first tech platform providing on-demand, affordable products and services for a range of health and beauty needs such as skincare, haircare and personal care in Indonesia.

6) Masterchow
Sidhanth Madan and Vidur Kataria
MasterChow is on a mission to give every Indian consumer the confidence to prepare delicious Asian meals at home.

7) Metastable Materials
Manikumar Uppala, Saurav Goyal and Shubham Vishvakarma
Metastable Materials is a deep tech company pioneering a low-cost, clean and highly scalable method of recycling lithium-ion batteries.

8) RedBrick AI
Derek Lukacs and Shivam Sharma
RedBrick AI is a purpose-built software as a service (SaaS) platform that helps companies build medical imaging AI.

9) Requestly
Sachin Jain, Sagar Soni and Sahil Gupta
Requestly is building a SaaS platform to empower developers and quality assurance engineers to test and debug web applications in real time.

10) Tentang Anak
Garri Juanda and Mesty Ariotedjo
Tentang Anak is Indonesia’s fastest growing parenting ecosystem that provides a one-stop solution for holistic child development.

11) Vaaree
Garima Luthra and Pranav Arora
Vaaree is a curated marketplace for high-quality home products in India.

12) Meragi
Abhinav Chandran, Lakshminarayan Balasubramaniam, Mukund Mohan Raj
Meragi is an online platform that provides modern wedding-related services.

Surge is Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s rapid-scale up program. It combines up to $3 million of seed capital with company-building workshops, a global curriculum and support from a community of exceptional mentors and founders.

The program’s goal is to supercharge early-stage startups in India and Southeast Asia and give founders an unfair advantage, right out of the gate.