(L to R) Rajan Anandan and Shailendra Singh Managing directors of Peak XV Partners at Bangalore.
Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
Peak XV Partners today revealed what it said is the most diverse cohort yet of its Surge programme, which seeks to help selected early-stage startups scale up rapidly. The Singapore-to-Bengaluru venture capital (VC) firm, formerly the India and Southeast Asia unit of America’s Sequoia Capital, has picked 14 ventures from Mumbai to Manila, Delhi to Dover and Singapore to Sydney.
Bengaluru, of course, figures prominently as home to several of the startups selected from India. Others come from China, UAE, a first for Surge, and the UK. Their work ranges from baking protein-enriched and maida-free bread, to making home loans transparent, to a software platform that helps developers do better. Then there are the evergreen areas of tech for financial services and enterprise sales.
“We want a bunch of companies that are going to be global market leaders; definitely India market leaders,” says Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV and Surge, in an interview with Forbes India. Startups that have graduated from Surge include both kinds of companies, he adds.
In Surge 10, Amaani, founded by Shubham Poddar, is building beauty and wellness brands from the UAE. Ambak, started by Raghuveer Malik, Rameshwar Gupta and Rashi Garg, in Bengaluru, aims to bring transparency, efficiency, and security to both customers and home loan distributors in India.
At Auquan, sibling founders Chandini and Shubh Jain, in Chicago, are artificial intelligence (AI) innovators automating various workflows in financial services. Kevin (Tiange) Ling, founder of Dubbing.ai, in Singapore, offers software for audience engagement through immersive role-playing and accent changing in real time.
Vinay Maheshwari, Mohit Sankhala and Jos Vast have risen from going door-to-door in one Mumbai locality on their bikes to multi-city retail for their healthy breads. At Parseable, Nitish Tiwari in Bengaluru offers an open-source, cloud-based platform for developers to efficiently store and manage logs, with powerful log analytics features.
Those who choose to play in the home market, be it India or Indonesia for example, “they have to be number one, because nobody remembers number two,” Anandan says. As to companies that aim to go global, they must still aspire to be at the top of the heap, but certainly among the top two, he says.
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Surge evaluates startups for their potential for “tremendous scale”, to see if they can generate tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The experience over the five years since Surge was started, and now into its 10th cohort, shows that “this model works”, he says.
Each selected startup, in addition to getting up to $3 million in seed funding, will receive “full-stack support and dedicated partnership” from the Surge investment and operating teams, including hiring, product, tech and marketing, Peak XV said in a press release today. Additionally, perks worth some $2 million include cloud storage, marketing tools, software and services.
Each company will receive one-on-one mentorship from leading global founders and operators. The Surge 10 programme will run from this month to February 2025, featuring a mix of in-person and online sessions, and events focussed on founder development, go-to-market strategies, product, sales refinement, brand building and so on. The programme ends with a US immersion experience, giving founders exposure to the Silicon Valley ecosystem, where they will visit the campuses of AI companies OpenAI and Notion, in February 2025. The previous cohort had visited AI chipmaker Nvidia’s campus earlier this year and met co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, according to the press release.
Overall, the aim is to make Surge a launchpad for startups looking to dominate their home markets, and in many cases, build global businesses. This all ties in with how the VC model works. VC firms need to see high valuations for their portfolio startups and, eventually, big returns as fiduciaries of the money they invest on behalf of their limited partners, who typically are large university endowment funds, family offices, very high-net-worth individuals and so on.
Surge was conceptualised and started by Peak XV managing director Shailendra Singh, who has been with Sequoia India and SEA (and now Peak XV) for close to 18 years. He’s led the firm from 2011. He roped in Anandan, who was leading Google India and SEA, to build and run Surge.
The two knew each other from several years earlier as co-investors in the occasional startup. For example, Singh had led an investment from the then-Sequoia in a data security software company called Druva, in which Anandan too became an angel investor. When Singh started Surge, he’d asked Anandan to be a mentor to the startups in the programme. And Singh recalled, “many, many, many chats” later, Anandan was ready to get onboard full time. “Entrepreneurs change the planet,” Anandan said. “And I could do it in one company [Google], or I could be in an environment like Surge to have a shot at helping create, hopefully, many of those companies.”
More than 350 founders from 17 sectors have passed through the Surge programme since its inception in 2019. Peak XV itself, over the last 17 years, has grown to manage more than $9 billion in capital spread over 13 funds, and invested in more than 400 companies, according to the firm’s press release.
“Even if a quarter of our companies were to be able to evolve their thinking a little bit and how they approach company building itself, that’s pretty powerful. Mission accomplished,” Singh had told Forbes India in an interview. “The results will show over 10, 20, 30 years, and some of these companies will outlive us.”