Startups in AI, travel, fraud detection, wholesale trade, e-commerce and healthcare dominated at the Peak XV Partners’ (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) latest cohort of female founders-focussed fellowship program Spark.
The multi-stage venture capital firm said on Monday that it has launched the third cohort of Spark, which is a female founder fellowship programme for early-stage startups.
The third cohort comprises 14 startups with 16 female founders, according to its statement.
Apart from the four startups in AI and healthcare, the cohort also comprised of companies from the software-as-a-service (SasS), business-to-business (B2B) and consumer spaces.
Launched in 2021, Spark is a four-month long programme that includes a $100,000 equity-free grant along with domain knowledge, mentorship and access to cloud credits, development tools, analytics amongst others.
The four AI-based companies include fraud detection platform RaptorX.ai, wholesale trade platform FOBOH, traveltech startup Traverse and e-commerce startup Wordsworth AI.
The healthtech startups include pediatric platform BabyMD; Soulside, an AI-powered mental health platform; Evenly, a chain of dermatology clinics and one company currently in stealth.
SaaS company Profit Peak, consumer brands Melvvi, Chosen and Fix My Curls along with analytics platform Meritic and consignment platform A-Sourced formed the rest of the cohort.
Peak XV Partners remained the most active investor in India, maintaining its top position this year with 43 deals, including 13 investments from Surge, its scale-up programme for early-stage startups, according to data collated by VCCircle.
It split up from the US parent in 2023 along with HongShan in China, has consistently been the most active VC investor in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 as well, with 87, 88, 53 and 73 deals, respectively.