Peak XV Raises Surge Seed Ceiling to $5 Million, Unveils 18-Startup Cohort

Peak XV Partners has raised its maximum investment per seed-stage startup to $5 million, up from $3 million, and deployed more than $50 million across the 18 companies in its newest Surge cohort.

The batch, called Surge 12, has collectively raised over $90 million in seed funding, according to Peak XV. The firm's median investment per company has also increased, though Peak XV declined to disclose the figure. At least three of the companies had already raised outside funding — in some cases from Peak XV itself — before joining the program.

The move marks a deliberate bet on bigger seed rounds. "The bar to raise a Series A has gone up pretty significantly," Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV, said in an interview. He said the firm is also seeing more capital-intensive companies, particularly in deeptech, raising larger rounds at the seed stage.

Peak XV, which manages more than $10 billion in assets across markets including India and Southeast Asia, has run Surge since 2019, when it operated as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia.

How global has Surge become?

Surge has grown more international with each cohort, Anandan said, with founders in the latest group spanning San Francisco to Sydney. The geography split tells the story:

• Just 5 of the 18 startups focus on the Indian market
• More than half of the companies are based in India
• The remaining 13 target global markets — a gap between where companies are built and where they expect to find customers

Since launch, Surge has backed more than 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs of more than 18 nationalities. Peak XV says the 10 largest companies to emerge from those cohorts now generate more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue.

Who gets in?

Anandan described Surge as one of two ways Peak XV invests at the seed stage, alongside its standard seed investing. The firm continues to back companies through later rounds. Founders typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialized technical founders — with about 50% to 60% of a typical cohort coming from operating roles at established technology companies.

The Surge 12 companies span AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech, from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots for underground pipes and satellites that detect radio-frequency signals from orbit.

Three startups in the cohort have not yet publicly revealed their names or products; Peak XV said they work in education, applied AI, and medical products.

Who made the cut?

• Alma — Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan are building a personal computing platform to make computer use faster and more affordable. Both previously worked at Microsoft Research and were founding engineers at Sarvam AI.
• August AI — Anuruddh Mishra, an IIT-BHU alumnus who started the company in 2022 after a personal medical misdiagnosis, runs a healthcare platform combining AI with physician-led care that reaches over 9 million users across 160 countries.
• Ditto — UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu built an AI dating matchmaker inside iMessage for college students. It had already raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round announced earlier this year.
• GameStock — Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana, and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad apply competition mechanics to financial markets. Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.
• HiLoop — Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar, and Thomas Boser help AI companies adapt open-weight models for specific applications via a post-training platform. The team includes former Reducto engineers and a Cambridge computer science PhD who finished his doctorate at 24.
• Hoola Health — Deeksha Senguttuva's platform consolidates pediatric consultations, vaccinations, medicines, diagnostics, developmental therapy, and dental services. Her family built and operated a hospital group.
• Kello — Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade are building an AI talent-discovery platform focused on potential over credentials. Gandhi says she was Airbnb's first female engineer and previously founded Upraised; Jingade co-founded AmbitionBox.
• Kindling — Adam Miller and Sachin Shah are building a "storytelling operating system" that uses AI to help startups produce communications and content.
• Puralink — Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz, and Thien "Long" Tran develop autonomous robots that navigate underground pipe networks. Crowe-Maxwell has built robots since childhood and turned university research into the startup's patented drive technology.
• Reinforce Labs — Anish Das Sarma builds tools to evaluate, red-team, and remediate enterprise AI systems. He previously founded a company acquired by Airbnb and led AI and machine-learning teams as a director at Google.
• Riffle — Anurag Choudhary and deo are building a browser-based platform where musicians create, collaborate on, and share music.
• Rosella — Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart run an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses. It raised a roughly $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital earlier this year.
• Tribe Money — Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker offer an AI-powered personal finance platform for tracking money and making investment decisions.
• ULOOK — Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik build autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence. The founders have worked on more than 12 satellite missions. The company raised roughly $2.3 million in seed funding from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures before joining Surge.
• Wingit — Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal run a beauty platform targeting India's growing premium-consumer market.

The higher ceiling signals how seed economics are shifting: as Series A requirements climb and deeptech models demand more early capital, Surge's $5 million maximum positions Peak XV to keep backing those companies from day one.