Sequoia India's Accelerator Programme Surge 03 chose 7 Indian Startups

SEQUOIA India picked 15 early-stage startups from South-east Asia and India for its third Surge Cohort on April 27, 2020. Surge’s third cohort kicked off on April 13 and the 16-week long program will last up to August. Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a travel ban and other restrictions due to lockdown. And hence it is a complete virtual event and happening remotely via video conferencing.

https://twitter.com/_surgeahead/status/1254614397936254977?s=20

Surge is Sequoia Capital's startup accelerator programme for early-stage startups in India and Southeast Asia. Surge 3 is hosting startups from India, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
This time the cohort consists of startups from different domains including software-as-a-service (SaaS), developer tools, consumer internet, fitness, F&B, education, and health among others. Moreover, almost one-third of the startups have at least one female founder.

These startups are Atlan, BukuKas, CoLearn, Convosight, DrinkPrime, Fittr, Hangry, Last9, Pencil, Pentester Academy, Procol, Thuocsi, Togerhall, and Tinvio (with one startup currently in stealth mode).


The seven Indian startups in the third cohort are Atlan, Fittr, DrinkPrime, Procol, Last9, Convosight, and CoLearn.

Meet the Startups selected in Third Surge Cohort

CoLearn

Founders: Abhay Saboo and Marc Irawan
Launched: January 2020
Co-investors: AC Ventures and Alpha JWC Ventures
CoLearn is an ed-tech platform that enables tuition centres and tutors to create online learning experiences for their students.

ConvoSight

Founders: Tamanna Dhamija, Tarun Dhamija, and Kartik Bansal
Launched: October 2019
Co-investor: IvyCap Ventures
Convosight is a community management platform that uses data analytics and machine learning to help admins and brands create, moderate, grow, and leverage communities meaningfully.

DrinkPrime

Founders: Manas Ranjan Hota and Vijender Reddy
Launched: March 2016
Co-investors: Angel investors
DrinkPrime’s mission is to bring clean, affordable drinking water to India, where millions of people cannot access potable water. The startup leverages the internet of things and a seven-stage filtration process to produce clean drinking water from the tap in any consumer’s home.

Procol

Founders: Gaurav Baheti and Sumit Mendiratta
Launched: October 2018
Co-investors: Beenext and Blume Ventures
Procol is a digital procurement platform that helps companies digitize their buying processes for better transparency, traceability, and cost savings.

Last9

Founders: Nishant Modak and Piyush Verma
Launched: January 2020
Co-investors: Better Capital and angel investors
Last9 is a site reliability engineering platform that makes running systems at scale easy. It is currently deployed in closed beta at some of the largest websites in India and Southeast Asia.

Atlan

Founders: Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka
Launched: July 2019
Co-investor: Waterbridge Ventures
Atlan is building a home for data teams by bringing together diverse people, tools, and data. It allows various team members to collaborate while using the tools they prefer to work with, such as a business user on Excel, an analyst on SQL, and a team of engineers on Python, making data science significantly more accessible to the organization.

Fittr

Founders: Jitendra Chouksey, Sonal Singh, Jyoti Dabas, Bala Krishna Reddy, and Rohit Chattopadhyay
Launched: March 2019
Co-investor: Better Capital

Fittr is an online fitness app that offers its community free access to diet and training tools provided by fitness experts and enthusiasts.

BukuKas

Founders: Krishnan Menon and Lorenzo Peracchione
Launched: December 2019
Co-investors: Credit Saison, Hustle Fund, Whiteboard Capital, 500 Startups, and angel investors
BukuKas helps owners of Indonesian micro, small, and medium enterprises understand and manage their financial flows more effectively with an easy-to-use digital ledger they can download on their smartphones.

Hangry

Founders: Abraham Viktor, Andreas Resha, and Robin Tan
Launched: November 2019
Co-investor: Alpha JWC Ventures
Hangry is a cloud kitchen that serves up multiple in-house restaurant brands for online orders and delivery. By using a common kitchen with shared staff and resources, Hangry’s asset-light model allows it to produce quality food at affordable prices for Indonesia’s fast-growing, mobile-first population.

Pencil

Founders: Will Hanschell and Sumukh Avadhani
 Launched: May 2019
 Co-investors: SG Innovate, Wavemaker Partners, and an angel investor
Pencil brings the scale of algorithms to the creative process by generating ads that are predicted to work. It is the first generative creative platform for performance advertising teams in brands and agencies.

Pentester Academy

Founder: Vivek Ramachandran
 Launched: March 2019
Pentester Academy trains security professionals on the art and science of defeating hackers and making the internet safer. It does this by replacing theory classes with practical experiences that are both fun and edifying.

Thuocsi

Founders: Nguyen Huu Minh Hoang, Nguyen Xuan Hiep, and Vuong Dinh Vu
Launched: November 2017
Co-investors: Cocoon Capital and Genesia Ventures
Thuocsi is an online business-to-business marketplace for pharmaceutical, health, and personal care needs. It was launched in Ho Chi Minh City in 2018 by Singapore-based health tech firm BuyMed to simplify Vietnam’s healthcare distribution process.

Tigerhall

Founder: Nellie Wartoft
Launched: March 2019
Co-investors: Taurus Ventures, XA Network (formerly Xoogler Angel Network), and angel investors
Tigerhall is a mobile learning platform that aims to help professionals achieve their career and life goals by learning directly from Asia’s most successful people.

Tinvio

Founder: Ajay Gopal
Launched: July 2019
Co-investors: Global Founders Capital and Partech Partners
Tinvio is a communication and commerce platform built around the idea that merchants and suppliers should be able to work smarter together.

According to Surge “Eighty per cent of Surge 03 startups are coming onboard with institutional co-investors, and almost half have Angel co-investors, too. Collectively, this cohort has raised over $39 million in their Surge rounds. (What’s more, Surge 01 and 02 startups have already raised USD 250M+ after completing Surge, in subsequent financing rounds).”

Sequoia Capital launched its First Cohort in March 2019 with 17 startups. In the second surge cohort in October 2019, it picked 20 startups.

Sequoia has picked up 15 startups in the third cohort from the community which has grown to over 110 founders with 52 startups based in six countries. Out of the 52 startups, 27 are from India.
Above all, the announcement of 15 startups is good news at this time of the Corona Crisis when the economy is down and startups are uncertain about the future.


The applications for Surge 04 from September 2020 to January 2021 are also open now.