Peak XV ups Surge seed investment ceiling to $5M, unveils 18-startup cohort
5:30 PM PDT · September 28, 2026
Peak XV Partners, one of the largest venture capital firms investing in markets including India and Southeast Asia with more than $10 billion in assets under management, has increased how much it invests per startup through Surge, its seed-stage investing platform, as it unveils a new cohort of 18 companies.
At least three of the companies in this cohort had already raised outside funding, in some cases from Peak XV itself, before joining Surge.
The new batch, called Surge 12, is the first to operate under Peak XV’s higher investment ceiling of up to $5 million per company, up from $3 million previously. The venture firm invested more than $50 million across the cohort, which has collectively raised over $90 million in seed funding, according to Peak XV. Its median investment per company has also increased, though the firm declined to disclose the figure.
“The bar to raise a Series A has gone up pretty significantly,” Rajan Anandan (pictured above), managing director at Peak XV, said in an interview. He added that the firm is also seeing more capital-intensive companies, particularly in deeptech, that are raising larger rounds at the seed stage.
Surge has become more global with each cohort, Anandan told TechCrunch, with its latest group spanning founders and companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Just five of the 18 startups in Surge 12 are focused on the Indian market, while more than half of the companies are based in India. The remaining 13 target global markets, highlighting the difference between where the 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 representing 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.
Anandan described Surge as Peak XV’s primary route for seed-stage investing, with the firm remaining an investor as companies progress through later funding rounds. The founders it backs typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialized technical founders, he said, with about 50% to 60% of a typical cohort made up of people coming from operating roles at established technology companies.
This cohort’s startups span AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech, ranging from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots built for underground pipes and satellites designed to detect radio-frequency signals from orbit.
The Surge 12 cohort
Alma — founded by Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan — is building 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. (TechCrunch wrote more about this one last month.) 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.
Next 5 VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 contenders at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
7:30 AM PDT · September 28, 2026
Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from around the world. Now comes the part everyone has been waiting for.
Startup Battlefield 200 is almost here, and with today’s announcement, the judging panel is nearly complete. In just a couple of weeks, 200 carefully selected startups will gather at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to exhibit, meet investors, and compete for one of the most coveted opportunities in the startup world. Only a select group will advance to the live competition, where they’ll pitch in front of thousands of founders, investors, media, and customers and face questions from some of the sharpest minds in technology.
Today’s judges bring decades of experience building companies, backing founders, and spotting transformative ideas before they become obvious. They’ll help decide which startups continue their journey toward the Startup Battlefield finals and, ultimately, who has a chance to lift this year’s trophy. If you want to see tomorrow’s industry leaders before the rest of the world does, there’s no better place to be than TechCrunch Disrupt.
The only way to be front and center at the Disrupt Stage and witness the ultimate pitch competition of the year is to register for TechCrunch Disrupt. Grab your pass and bring your co-founder, partner, or peer for 50% off. Bringing a community of four or more? Save up to 30% on passes..
Meet the next wave of Startup Battlefield judges
Get to know the 20 judges revealed so far by visiting the Disrupt agenda. Stay tuned for the final announcement, where we’ll unveil the five judges who will evaluate the finalists and determine who takes home the $100,000 equity-free prize and coveted Disrupt Cup.
Caleb Appleton, Partner, Bison Ventures
Caleb Appleton is a partner at Bison Ventures, where he invests in physical AI across techbio, robotics, and real-world intelligence. A biomedical engineer by training, his investments include Cobot, Vivodyne, Passkey, Sleuth, Inner Logic, Cosmon, and Grid Aero. Previously, Appleton invested in frontier technologies at Innovation Endeavors and spent several years as an operator at TuneIn, giving him experience spanning early-stage science, venture investing, and scaling a technology business.
Sara Deshpande, General Partner, Maven Ventures
Sara Deshpande is a general partner at Maven Ventures, where she invests in seed-stage companies built around emerging consumer behaviors and trends. She focuses on consumer software spanning digital health and consumer applications of AI. Deshpande joined Maven as its first employee in 2014 and has spent a decade in venture capital. She received her MBA from Stanford, where she now teaches a course on startups and entrepreneurship.
Aatish Nayak, Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Aatish Nayak joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner in May 2026, where he focuses on partnering with AI native founders with deep vertical expertise across all domains.
Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Nayak was the first PM and VP of Product at Harvey, where he helped build the early product, design, marketing, analytics, and support teams. Before that, he was an early product leader at Scale AI working on data infrastructure for e-commerce, early NLP (GPT-2), and autonomous vehicles. And before that, he was at Shield AI working on the core knowledge stack for robotic defense systems that save lives.
Jason Risch, Partner, Greylock
Jason Risch is a partner at Greylock, where he invests in enterprise security, AI and ML infrastructure, data platforms, and developer tools. His portfolio includes Onehouse, a cloud-native managed lakehouse platform, and Baseten, an ML model serving toolkit for data science teams. Before joining Greylock, Risch worked in business operations at Opendoor, as a management consultant at McKinsey’s Bay Area practice, and as a startup builder at the AI Fund. He studied mathematical and computational science at Stanford University.
Mark Xu, Partner, Index Ventures
Mark Xu is a partner at Index Ventures, where he invests across stages in cybersecurity, infrastructure, and AI. He has backed companies building at the frontier of AI, including Fireworks, Parallel, 7AI, Simile, and Flapping Airplanes, and previously worked as a growth investor at Lightspeed, supporting such companies as Wiz, Glean, and Grafana. Xu looks for deeply technical founders who combine domain expertise with hustle and an obsession with their customers.
Grab your Disrupt pass and don’t miss Startup Battlefield
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is happening October 13-15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, bringing 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and founders together to meet the next generation of breakout startups, connect with leaders who could change their startup’s trajectory, and get a front-row seat to where the industry is headed.
Register now to save up to $100 before Disrupt doors open, and bring your co-founder, colleague, or peer with a second pass for 50% off. Experience all that Disrupt has to offer together, from six industry stages, roundtables, and breakout sessions to the startups and connections shaping what’s next in tech.
