Surge, the Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s rapid scale up programme, on Tuesday announced 12 early-stage startups for its eighth cohort.
Startups like Arintra, MasterChow, AltWorld and Metastable Materials are among Sequoia Surge's new funding cohort. Nearly, half of the startups named have at least one female founder, including two medical doctors from Indonesia and a PhD holder of natural language processing.
The eighth cohort includes AI-powered autonomous medical coding platform Arintra; metaverse gaming platform AltWorld; Bifrost, which builds virtual worlds and synthetic datasets that artificial intelligence teams can use to train AI models; Calyx Global, a carbon credits-focused company; Diri Care, a consumer-first tech platform focused on providing on-demand affordable products and services and MasterChow, which offers ready to cook products.
Other startups in the cohort include Metastable Materials, deep tech startup focused on recycling lithium-ion batteries; RedBrick AI, a SaaS platform that helps companies build medical imaging artificial intelligence; Requestly, which is also a SaaS platform focused on developers and quality assurance engineers to test and debug web applications in real-time; Vaaree, a marketplace for home products; Meragi, a platform that provides wedding-related services and Tentang Anak, an Indonesian startup focused on creating a parenting ecosystem which provides a solution for child development.
The cohort includes 30 founders, which adds to Surge’s current pool of over 300 founders from more than 130 startups.
“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,” said Rajan Anandan, managing director, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, and Surge.
Since its launch in 2019, the accelerator has helped its participating startups raise over $2 billion in follow-on funding from Surge and other co-investors, Sequoia said in a statement.
The speakers and mentors in this cohort who have advised Surge entrepreneurs include Info Edge co-founder Sanjeev Bikchandani, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal and Meesho founder Vidit Aatrey.
The Surge programme has backed over 300 founders across 130 startups in 16 sectors to date. Initially, the firm used to invest $1 million and $2 million each in startups which are increased now up to $3 million. Previously Classplus, Plum, Scaler Academy, and Khatabook were part of surge cohorts.