Surge unveils its eighth cohort of 12 startups across India and SEA

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50% of startups have a female founder

● This cohort is pioneering next generation products in AI, gaming in the Metaverse, health tech, new consumer brands and climate tech

● Half of the startups have a female founder

● To date, Surge startups have collectively raised over US$2 billion in follow-on funding from Surge and co-investors

Bengaluru,1st March 2023 – 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 08 includes startups that are building futuristic products across climate tech, AI (Artificial Intelligence), 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.

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

“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.

Many founders are building for global markets from day one, and half of the startups in Surge 08 are looking to expand into the US, 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 Sanjeev Bikchandani (InfoEdge), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Kunal Shah (CRED), Amrish Rau (Pinelabs), Abhiraj Singh Bhal (Urban Company), Kunal Bahl (Snapdeal), Yamini Bhat (Vymo), Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm), Ashwini Asokan (vue.ai/Mad Street Den), Deepinder Goyal (Zomato), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), and Vidit Aatrey (Meesho).

For the full breakdown of Surge 08 companies, please refer to the Appendix below. To learn more about Surge 08, please head to our blog post, and find out more about each Surge 08 company here.

Surge 08 Companies and Founders:

For full company profiles, please click here.

No.

Company

Founders

Description

1

Arintra

Nitesh Shroff and Preeti Bhargava

Arintra is an AI-powered autonomous medical coding platform that helps US 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 SaaS platform that helps companies build medical imaging artificial intelligence.

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.