Meet The 7 Indian Startups That Are Part Of Sequoia Surge’s Eight Cohort

Sequoia Capital’s accelerator and incubation programme Surge has launched its eighth cohort featuring 12 early-stage startups from India and Southeast Asia. Out of the 12 startups, seven are based out of India. 

“Half of Surge 08 startups have at least one female founder, including an AI and natural language processing PhD holder and two medical doctors from Indonesia,” Sequoia Surge said in a blog post.

The eighth cohort will be a 16-week hybrid program. It includes startups from sectors including climate tech, AI, Metaverse, healthtech, consumertech and ecommerce. More than half of the shortlisted startups in Surge 08 are to expand into the US, Europe and Canada.

As per Sequoia, including this cohort, Surge’s startup community includes more than 300 founders and over 130 startups working across 16+ sectors. So far, Surge startups have collectively raised over $2 Bn in follow-on funding from Surge and co-investor.

“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 of Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, and Surge. 

Sequoia Capital earlier said that it would invest up to $3 Mn in seed to Pre-Series A rounds of Indian and Southeast Asian startups, selected for Surge 08 cohort. 

Some of the former speakers and mentors in the program include Sanjeev Bikchandani from Info Edge, Girish Mathrubootham from Freshworks, Kunal Shah from CRED, Amrish Rau from Pine Labs, Abhiraj Singh Bhal from Urban Company and Kunal Bahl from Snapdeal, among others.

Meet The 12 Startups From Sequoia Surge’s Eighth Cohort

• Startup Name: Arintra 
• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Nitesh Shroff, Preeti Bhargava
• Headquarters: US 
• Sector: Artificial intelligence 

Arintra is an AI-enabled medical coding platform that helps hospitals automate their insurance claims submission. It claims to be converting a patient’s information into insurance claims with 96% accurate medical coding and zero human intervention.

• Startup Name: AltWorld 
• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Alok Maurya, Saurabh Maheshwari, Subham Kumar Boundia
• Headquarters: India
• Sector: Gaming

AltWorld is a Metaverse-based gaming platform that enables GenZ gamers to create personalised third-dimension (3D) worlds and games. It also connects these 3D worlds and games to offer an immersive social gaming experience to users. 

• Startup Name: Bifrost
• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Aravind Satkunasingam Kandiah, Charles Wong Zheng Xun
• Headquarters: US
• Sector: AI 

Bifrost develops synthetic datasets and virtual worlds that AI teams can utilise to train AI models for various sectors including gaming, the metaverse, mobility, robotics, space and defence.

• Startup Name: Calyx Global
• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Donna Lee, Duncan van Bergen
• Headquarters: US 
• Sector: Climatetech 

Calyx Global provides carbon credit ratings that helps businesses choose better carbon credits and protect themselves from financial and reputational risk.

• Startup Name: Diri Care
• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Armand Amadeus, Christian Suwarna, Deviana Himawan
• Headquarters: Indonesia 
• Sector: Consumertech 

Diri Care offers a slew of skincare, haircare and personal care products and services to consumers in Indonesia. 

• Startup Name: MasterChow
• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Sidhanth Madan, Vidur Kataria
• Headquarters: India
• Sector:  D2C 

MasterChow offers Asian food products including ready-to-made meals, sauces and edible oils to consumers via its website and ecommerce marketplaces. 

• Startup Name: Metastable Materials
• Founded In: 2021 
• Founders: Manikumar Uppala, Saurav Goyal, Shubham Vishvakarma
• Headquarters: India
• Sector: Cleantech

Metastable Materials uses a metal extraction method to recycle lithium-ion batteries. With this method, it minimises waste and improves efficiency while recycling lithium-ion batteries. It further uses extracts from Lithium-ion batteries as sustainable alternatives to the freshly mined metals.

• Startup Name: RedBrick AI
• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Derek Lukacs, Shivam Sharma
• Headquarters: India
• Sector: AI SaaS

RedBrick AI helps medical imaging teams interpreting medical data such as CT scan, MRI and Ultrasound, among others

• Startup Name: Requestly
• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Sachin Jain, Sagar Soni, Sahil Gupta
• Headquarters: India
• Sector: SaaS

Requestly enables software developers and quality assurance engineers to test and debug web applications in real time. It also allows developers to modify headers, redirect URLs, switch hosts, mock API response and delay network requests.

• Startup Name: Tentang Anak   
• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Garri Juanda, Mesty Ariotedjo
• Headquarters: Indonesia
• Sector: Healthtech

Tentang Anak is an online parenting platform that provides paediatric and medical practitioners-led products and services for holistic development of children.

• Startup Name: Vaaree  
• Founded In: 2022
• Founders: Garima Luthra, Pranav Arora
• Headquarters: India
• Sector: ecommerce

Vaaree is an online marketplace that sells home decor, kitchenware, bathroom accessories, and gardening equipment to consumers

• Startup Name: Meragi
• Founded In: 2021 
• Founders: Abhinav Chandran, Lakshminarayan Balasubramaniam, Mukund Mohan Raj
• Headquarters: India
• Sector: Consumer Services

Meragi is an online platform that offers wedding-related services such as wedding decor, photography, makeup, catering and entertainment, among others.

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Update|March 1, 7.06 PM

The story has been updated to include correct details of startups, shortlisted for Surge 08 cohort