Surge launches its seventh cohort of 15 Southeast Asian, Indian startups

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

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 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 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.

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 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.

“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 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 US$1.7 billion in follow-on funding, with over 60% of companies from the first five cohorts raising their series A and beyond.

Surge is Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s rapid-scale up program. Surge 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.