Peak XV Partners, one of the largest venture capital firms with over $10 billion in assets under management, investing in markets such as India and Southeast Asia, has increased the amount invested per startup through its seed stage investment platform Surge as it announces a new group of 18 companies.
At least three of the companies in this cohort had already raised external funding, and in some cases from Peak XV itself, before joining Surge.
The new batch, called Surge 12, is the first to operate under Peak XV’s higher investment cap of up to $5 million per company, up from $3 million previously. According to Peak XV, the venture has invested more than $50 million across its cohort and has raised more than $90 million in total seed funding. The median investment amount per company also increased, although the company declined to disclose numbers.
“The bar for raising a Series A has risen considerably,” Rajan Anandan (pictured above), managing director of Peak XV, said in an interview. He added that he is also seeing more capital-intensive companies raising larger seed-stage funding, especially in the deep tech space.
Anandan told TechCrunch that Surge is becoming more global by group, with the latest group including founders and companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Of the 18 startups in Surge 12, only five are focused on the Indian market and more than half are based in India. The remaining 13 companies target global markets, highlighting the differences between where companies are founded and where they expect to find customers.
Since its founding in 2019, when Peak XV operated as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, Surge has backed over 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs representing over 18 nationalities. According to Peak XV, the 10 largest companies to emerge from these groups currently have combined annual revenues of more than $1 billion.
Anandan explained that Surge is Peak XV’s primary route for seed-stage investment, and that the company will remain an investor as the company goes through subsequent funding rounds. He said the founders the firm supports typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialized technical founders, with about 50% to 60% of the typical population consisting of people who have held sales positions at established technology companies.
The startups in this cohort span AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech, and range from AI safety and personal computing to underground pipes designed to detect radio frequency signals from orbit and autonomous robots built for satellites.
Surge 12 Cohort
Founded by Nischith Shadagopan MN and Vinod Ganesan, Alma builds personal computing platforms focused on making computing faster and more affordable. The company’s founder previously worked at Microsoft Research and was a founding engineer at Sarvam AI, a Bangalore-based startup that builds AI models for Indian languages.
Founded by Anurud Mishra, an IIT-BHU graduate who founded the company in 2022 after a personal medical misdiagnosis, August AI provides a healthcare platform that combines AI and physician-led care, serving more than 9 million users across 160 countries.
Ditto: Founded by University of California, Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu, the company works as an AI dating matchmaker within iMessage, with the goal of helping college students turn digital introductions into in-person connections. (TechCrunch wrote more about this last month.) The company had already raised $9.2 million in a seed round led by Peak XV announced earlier this year.
Founded by Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana, and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad, GameStock brings competition to the financial markets, making investing and trading a more competitive experience. Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.
Founded by Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar, and Thomas Boser, HiLoop uses a post-training platform to help AI companies adapt general-purpose open-weight models to specific applications. The founding team includes a former Reducto engineer and a Cambridge Computer Science PhD who completed his PhD at the age of 24.
Founded by Deeksha Senguttuva, Hoola Health focuses on the care of children and their families, providing consultations, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, developmental therapy, and dental services on a single platform. Sengtuvan grew up around healthcare, as her family founded and ran a hospital group.
Founded by Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade, Kello is building an AI-powered talent discovery platform that focuses on identifying candidate potential and trajectory, rather than relying primarily on traditional credentials. Gandhi said she was Airbnb’s first female engineer and previously founded Upraised, while Jingade previously co-founded AmbitionBox.
Kindle, founded by Adam Miller and Sachin Shah, is building a so-called “storytelling operating system” for tech startups that uses AI to help companies develop and produce communications and content.
Founded by Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz, and Thien “Long” Tran, Puralink develops autonomous robots that can navigate underground pipe networks. Crowe-Maxwell has been building robots since he was a child and turned his university research into the patented drive technology behind his startup.
Founded by Anish Das Sarma, Reinforce Labs develops tools to assess, red team, and remediate enterprise AI systems. Sarma previously founded a company that was acquired by Airbnb and later served on the board at Google, where he led the AI and machine learning team.
Founded by Anurag Choudhary and deo, Riffle is building a browser-based platform that allows musicians to create, collaborate, and share music, reducing the need to jump between different tools during the creative process.
Founded by Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart, Rosella is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses, using AI to automate some of the traditionally manual business insurance search and application processes. Rosella raised approximately $2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital earlier this year.
Founded by Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker, Tribe Money provides an AI-powered personal finance platform that helps users track their money, research investments, and make investment decisions.
Founded by Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik, ULOOK builds autonomous satellite systems for radio frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence targeting customers around the world. Its founders have worked on more than a dozen satellite missions. Before joining Surge, the company had already raised approximately $2.3 million in seed funding from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures.
Founded by Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal, Wingit is building a beauty platform targeting India’s growing luxury consumer market. It focuses on how consumers find and purchase high-end beauty products.
Three other startups in this group have not yet announced their names or products. Peak XV said it is working on education, applied AI, and medical products.
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