While the world is battling a pandemic, Indian startups have continued to raise funds, with 23 new unicorn startups entering the club. Data from analytics firm Tracxn show that private equity firms and venture capital firms have invested $35.38 billion to date up to June 2021.
When deal flow activity is at its zenith in the region, Sequoia Capital India has selected 23 startups for its fifth cohort of Surge.
About Sequoia Capital
The Sequoia Capital Group is a renowned private equity and venture capital firm based in the United States. Sequoia Capital is a stage-agnostic investor that has funded and supported over 1500 companies worldwide. These companies control a combined stock market value of $1.4 trillion through Sequoia’s investment and incubation.
Surge
(n) A powerful swell or wave. Growing suddenly and powerfully. A significant rise in voltage.
(v) To rise rapidly or advance rapidly.
About Sequoia's Surge Program
In Surge, founders are given a competitive advantage to scale and grow, make intelligent business model decisions at the start, and raise a Series A round soon after.
Startups based in or targeting the Indian and Southeast Asian markets are welcome to apply to Surge. Early-stage companies looking to build anything from consumer media, cloud software, or enterprise software, to fintech and financial services are welcome to apply.
You can never start too early. The Surge program is open to anyone with an idea and PowerPoint or a team at an early stage that has product-market fit and seed funding.
It will accept a cohort of 10-20 companies to Surge, which runs twice a year. The fifth cohort was the latest surge round conducted by Sequoia.
How will Surge help a startup?
It’s designed to amplify your idea and supercharge your startup. Surge’s team of mentors and experts will help founders make real progress towards launching or accelerating their companies.
Surge Team:
For each company, it will develop a 16-week action plan with the Surge team. As part of the plan, you will track weekly progress, become better connected with experts, and layout an overall strategy.
Mentors:
Surge’s mentorship panel includes successful startup founders, operators, company builders, and experienced investors—people with real-life experience. Your advisor can help brainstorm growth hacks for your startup or even get down in the weeds with you if needed.
Experts:
You can contact these experts for help in technology, recruiting, marketing, finance, legal/compliance, fundraising, and more. You can consult these experts whenever you have specific questions, such as which technology platform is best suited to handle hypergrowth or how to structure your ESOP pool most effectively. At the beginning of the program, founders can request one-to-one meetings with experts.
Funding and terms:
- Surge will invest between $1 million and $2 million in equity in all participating companies as part of the program.
- Surge will organize an investor week at the end of the program to assist you in raising funding from a curated pool of investors. The investors will determine the terms of the round.
How it works:
The Surge program runs virtually one day a week for 16 weeks. A Sequoia team helps you design, configure, and scale your startup during the program as you learn the fundamentals of company building! The program ends with an investor week, UpSurge, and an investor call.
Workshops for AMP are offered on select weeks, dinners with your cohort and senior ecosystem investors and founders, and weeklong international immersion trips. The execution sprints throughout the program allow you to continue to build your company.
In UpSurge, which consists of networking mixers and one-on-one meetings, founders can showcase their businesses to a larger group of venture and strategic investors.
Demo days are not high-stakes, stressful auction-style events like capital auctions. As part of this week, you’ll get the chance to build relationships, make connections, and find prospective partners who will be with you for the long run.
Through alumni events and other networking opportunities, you will stay connected with the Surge movement.
As you build relationships with other founders, coaches, mentors, and experts, these relationships will affect your entrepreneurial journey long after you graduate.
The list of investments made in the Fifth cohort of Surge
One of the 23 companies is still in stealth mode. The remaining 22 are as follows.
Absolute: Agam Khare and Prateek Rawat founded Absolute, which builds an adaptive plant bioscience platform that will use artificial intelligence to optimize yields, grades, and nutritional value of crops.
ADPList: The Southeast Asian startup makes mentoring accessible to everyone through a community platform where people can find, book, and meet mentors worldwide.
ApnaKlub: It offers an agent-led B2B wholesale market for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). Shruti Kumar and Manish Kumar founded the startup, whose mission is to empower and encourage micro distributions by providing better profit margins, a wide variety of products and brands, and supply consistency.
Before: With its clean, high-performance, vegan makeup, Ainara Kaur and Akaljit Kaur handcraft Belora Cosmetics. Its goal is to offer women makeup that does double duty as skincare, so not only are their products skin-friendly but they can also be dermatologically tested.
Durianpay: It is establishing a comprehensive payments integration platform that allows a business to grow and expand. Antara Sara Mathai, Kumar Puspesh, and Natasha Ardiani aim to modernize payments across SEA, which will improve both the experiences of customers and merchants.
Date: Founded by Abhishek Kankani, Kushagra Vaish, and Palash Golecha, Dyte is a developer-friendly software development kit (SDK) for real-time audio and video conferencing. This allows developers to integrate live video into their apps excitingly and innovatively.
Gimlet: A media delivery platform created by Aditya Patadia and Divyesh Patel automates the entire publishing pipeline by applying low-code or no-code integration plug-ins. Gimlet makes it easy for developers to provide the best image and video size with the best resolution and performance.
Located: A multichannel e-commerce fulfillment company founded by Constantin Robertz, Jannis Dargel, and Shrey Jain, Located makes multichannel e-commerce fulfillment possible. By reducing shipping time and costs with distributed warehousing, it reduces shipping times and costs.
Mailmodo: Mailmodo enables marketers to build app-like experiences within their emails and increase conversions. Apurv Gupta, Aquibur Rahman, and Devyesh Tandon are the founders.
Mesh: Gaurav Chaubey, Rahul Singh, and Saurabh Nangia founded Mesh, an agile platform that allows employees to set goals, receive timely feedback, and develop more rapidly.
Multiplier: Multiplier simplifies international hiring through its Employer of Record model. Employers can hire international teams easily with the platform, which handles all the complexities of local compliance, labor contracts, payroll, benefits, and taxes. Vamsi Krishna, Sagar Khatri, and Amritpal Singh founded it.
OneCode: Founded by Manish Shara and Yash Desai, OneCode allows companies to connect with agents and providing them with access to sell products and services to less tech-savvy buyers. The startup aims to connect brands and potential buyers by digitizing the 50 million sales agents across India and bridging the gap between brands and buyers who may require in-person interactions.
PowerPlay: PowerPlay is a mobile-first, vernacular construction site management app designed to enhance communication and collaboration between project managers and construction workers. Powerplay connects stakeholders via its platform to digitize the construction industry in India, enabling better and faster construction projects nationwide. Tracking their progress, deliverables, and payments are made easy with the app.
Pankhuri: Pankhuri offers live streaming, chat, and micro-courses that allow women to network, learn, and shop online. It allows Indian women to engage in beauty and lifestyle discussions online instead of being passive consumers. A startup named Pankhuri Shrivastava founded it.
Rara Delivery: RaRa Delivery is revolutionizing instant delivery for e-commerce in Indonesia by using data-driven logistics.
Revery: Tammie Siew and Khoa Tran are behind Revery, a company that uses game thinking to revolutionize wellness, and they’re working on making wellness affordable and accessible for everyone.
TWID: TWID (That’s What I Do) is an online rewards program where coupons or loyalty points can be redeemed for payments. Rishi Batra, Amit Koshal, and Amit Sharma founded the startup.
Vah Vah: It offers professional beauty courses online through a live, on-demand training platform. To prepare India’s young and dynamic population for their future careers, this startup strives to educate and train them. It provides them with vocational skills so that they can secure employment or become entrepreneurs.
Vara: Abhinav Karale and Vidush Mahansaria founded Vara, an easy-to-use, lightweight platform designed for small and medium enterprises across Southeast Asia. The application makes managing attendance and payroll easy for small businesses.
Veera Health: Veera Health offers a comprehensive range of services, including therapy, coaching, and specialist support for the polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), its first offering. Shebhita Narain and Shashwata Narain are the co-founders of the startup.
Virtual Internships: The future of internships is reimagined through virtual internships, mirroring the modern workplace. The company, created by Daniel Nivern and Edward Holroyd Pearce, believes in democratizing the global workforce. This is done by enabling students of all backgrounds and nationalities to gain access to jobs worldwide.
WATI: A user-friendly customer engagement tool built on the WhatsApp Business API, WATI enables companies to have personalized conversations with customers at scale.
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