Peak XV Partners, which manages more than $10 billion in assets and invests across regions including India and Southeast Asia, has raised the maximum per-company seed check on its Surge program to $5 million from the previous $3 million. The firm also announced the 18-company Surge 12 cohort.
According to Peak XV, the firm invested more than $50 million across the Surge 12 batch, and the cohort’s companies have collectively raised over $90 million in seed funding. The company said the median investment per company has increased as well, but declined to disclose the exact figure.
At least three companies in the cohort had already raised outside capital before joining Surge — in some cases from Peak XV itself. For example, Ditto previously raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round; ULOOK had raised roughly $2.3 million from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures; and Rosella completed about a $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital.
"The bar to raise a Series A has gone up pretty significantly," Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV, said in an interview. He added that the firm is seeing more capital-intensive companies, particularly in deeptech, that require larger seed rounds.
Global reach and cohort composition
Anandan said Surge has grown more global with each cohort: the current group of founders and companies stretches from San Francisco to Sydney. Only five of the 18 startups are primarily focused on the Indian market, while more than half of the cohort is based in India. The remaining 13 target global markets, illustrating the gap between where companies are built and where they expect to find customers.
Since its launch in 2019, when Peak XV operated as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, Surge has backed more than 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs from over 18 nationalities. Peak XV says the 10 largest companies that have emerged from those cohorts now generate more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue.
How Surge fits into Peak XV’s seed strategy
Anandan described Surge as one route for Peak XV to invest at the seed stage alongside its standard seed investments. The firm often remains an investor as companies move through later rounds. Founders supported by Surge commonly include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators and highly specialised technical founders; about 50–60% of a typical cohort comes from operating roles at established tech companies.
Themes and participants in Surge 12
Surge 12 spans sectors including AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music and fintech. Startups in the batch range from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots for underground pipes and satellites for radio-frequency sensing.
Selected cohort companies and founders:
- Alma — founded by Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan; building a personal computing platform to make computer use faster and more affordable. The founders previously worked at Microsoft Research and were founding engineers at Sarvam AI.
- August AI — founded by Anuruddh Mishra; a healthcare platform combining AI and physician-led care, started after a personal medical misdiagnosis in 2022, now reaching over 9 million users across 160 countries.
- Ditto — founded by Allen Wang and Eric Liu; an AI matchmaker inside iMessage aimed at helping college students turn digital introductions into in-person connections. Ditto had already raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round.
- GameStock — founded by Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad; brings competition mechanics to financial markets.
- HiLoop — founded by Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar and Thomas Boser; a post-training platform that helps companies adapt general-purpose open-weight models for specific applications.
- Hoola Health — founded by Deeksha Senguttuva; a platform focusing on care for children and families, offering consultations, vaccinations, medicines, diagnostics and developmental therapy.
- Kello — founded by Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade; an AI-powered talent-discovery platform that assesses potential and trajectory over conventional credentials.
- Kindling — founded by Adam Miller and Sachin Shah; a "storytelling operating system" that uses AI to help startups develop and produce communications and content.
- Puralink — founded by Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz and Thien “Long” Tran; developing autonomous robots for navigating underground pipe networks.
- Reinforce Labs — founded by Anish Das Sarma; building tools to evaluate, red-team and remediate enterprise AI systems.
- Riffle — founded by Anurag Choudhary and deo; a browser-based platform for musicians to create, collaborate and share music.
- Rosella — founded by Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart; an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses; raised roughly $2.5 million pre-seed earlier this year.
- Tribe Money — founded by Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker; an AI-powered personal finance platform.
- ULOOK — founded by Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik; building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence; founders have worked on more than 12 satellite missions and had raised about $2.3 million before joining Surge.
- Wingit — founded by Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal; a beauty platform targeting India’s premium consumer market.
Three other startups in the cohort have not yet publicly disclosed their names or products; Peak XV said they operate in education, applied AI and medical products.
Why this matters
Raising the seed check ceiling to $5 million signals that Peak XV sees larger capital requirements at the earliest stages, particularly for deeptech and capital-intensive businesses. The Surge 12 cohort’s geographic spread and sector diversity reflect how early-stage investing has become more global and technologically broad.
