Peak XV Partners has raised its seed-stage investment ceiling to $5 million and announced a new cohort of 18 startups under its Surge programme.
The new batch
Peak XV, which manages more than $10 billion in assets across India and Southeast Asia, previously capped investments at $3 million. The firm now says it will deploy up to $5 million per company. It has invested more than $50 million into this specific group, which has collectively secured over $90 million in seed funding.
The firm declined to share the median investment size. At least three companies in the group had raised outside capital before joining Surge, including funding from Peak XV itself.
Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV, told TechCrunch that the threshold for raising a Series A round has risen considerably. He noted that the firm is seeing more capital-intensive businesses, particularly in deeptech, seeking larger sums at the seed stage.
Global reach and local roots
The cohort spans founders and companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Only five of the 18 startups focus on the Indian market, yet more than half are based in India. The remaining 13 target global markets, showing a split between where the companies are built and where they expect to find customers.
Since launching in 2019 as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, Surge has backed more than 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs from more than 18 nationalities. The 10 largest companies emerging from previous cohorts now generate more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue.
Anandan described Surge as one method the firm uses at the seed stage, alongside its standard seed investing. The firm continues to invest as companies progress through later rounds. He said the founders typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialised technical founders. About 50% to 60% of a typical cohort comes from operating roles at established technology companies.
The startups cover AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech. Projects range from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots for underground pipes and satellites designed to detect radio-frequency signals from orbit.
Company list
Alma — Founded by Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan — builds a personal computing platform focused on making computer use faster and more affordable. Its founders previously worked at Microsoft Research and were founding engineers at Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup building AI models for Indian languages.
August AI — Founded by Anuruddh Mishra, an IIT-BHU alumnus who started the company in 2022 after a personal medical misdiagnosis — provides a healthcare platform that combines AI with physician-led care, reaching over 9 million users across 160 countries.
Ditto — Founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu — works as an AI dating matchmaker inside iMessage, aimed at helping college students turn digital introductions into in-person connections. The company had already raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round announced earlier this year.
GameStock — Founded by Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana, and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad — brings competition mechanics to financial markets, turning investing and trading into a more competitive experience. Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.
HiLoop — Founded by Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar, and Thomas Boser — helps AI companies adapt general-purpose open-weight models for specific applications using its post-training platform. Its founding team includes former Reducto engineers and a Cambridge computer science PhD who completed his doctorate at 24.
Hoola Health — Founded by Deeksha Senguttuva — focuses on care for children and their families, providing consultations, vaccinations, medicines, diagnostics, developmental therapy, and dental services on a single platform. Senguttuvan grew up around healthcare, as her family built and operated a hospital group.
Kello — Founded by Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade — is building an AI-powered talent-discovery platform focused on identifying a candidate’s potential and trajectory rather than relying primarily on conventional credentials. Gandhi says she was Airbnb’s first female engineer and she previously founded Upraised, while Jingade previously co-founded AmbitionBox.
Kindling — Founded by Adam Miller and Sachin Shah — is building what it calls a “storytelling operating system” for technology startups, using AI to help companies develop and produce their communications and content.
Puralink — Founded by Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz, and Thien “Long” Tran — is developing autonomous robots that can navigate underground pipe networks. Crowe-Maxwell has been building robots since childhood and turned university research into the patented drive technology behind the startup.
Reinforce Labs — Founded by Anish Das Sarma — is developing tools to evaluate, red-team, and remediate enterprise AI systems. Sarma previously founded a company acquired by Airbnb and later served as a director at Google, where he led AI and machine-learning teams.
Riffle — Founded by Anurag Choudhary and deo — is building a browser-based platform where musicians can create, collaborate on, and share music, reducing the need to move between separate tools during the creative process.
Rosella — Founded by Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart — is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses, using AI to automate parts of the traditionally manual process of finding and placing business insurance. Rosella raised a roughly $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital earlier this year.
Tribe Money — Founded by Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker — gives an AI-powered personal finance platform that helps users track their money, research investments and make investing decisions.
ULOOK — Founded by Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik — is building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence, targeting customers globally. Its founders have worked on more than 12 satellite missions. The company had already raised roughly $2.3 million in seed funding from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures before joining Surge.
Wingit — Founded by Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal — is building a beauty platform aimed at India’s growing premium-consumer market. It is focused on how consumers discover and shop for higher-end beauty products.
Three other startups in the cohort have yet to publicly reveal their names or products. Peak XV said they are working in education, applied AI, and medical products.
What it means
For founders in music and other creative sectors, the change is practical. Riffle offers a browser-based environment where musicians can create, collaborate, and share work without switching between separate tools. This reduces friction in the creative process by keeping all assets in one place.
