Venture capital firm Peak XV has selected 18 startups for the 12th cohort of Surge, its seed-stage accelerator programme. The cohort spans artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, space technology, consumer internet, healthcare, financial services and music.
Through Surge, Peak XV invests up to $5 million in a startup and provides support across hiring, product development, engineering, go-to-market strategy, communications, policy and global expansion.
Since launching in 2019, Surge has backed more than 180 startups across 18 nationalities, with its top 10 portfolio companies collectively generating over $1 billion in annual revenue.
This year's cohort reflects three emerging trends in early-stage technology: consumer experiences being rebuilt around changing user expectations; AI evolving from a feature into the underlying architecture of products; and growing investment in technologies that address real-world infrastructure challenges.
Consumer and healthcare
Consumer-focused startups include Ditto, which aims to move dating beyond swipe-based interactions; Wingit, a beauty platform targeting premium Indian consumers; and GameStock, which applies gaming mechanics to investing.
Healthcare startups include August AI, which combines AI with physician-led primary care and says it has reached nine million users across 160 countries, and Hoola Health, which is building a paediatric healthcare ecosystem. Riffle is developing a browser-based platform for music creation and collaboration.
AI-native companies
Several startups are building AI-first products and infrastructure.
Alma is developing personal computing tools for an AI-native world, while Kello is building a people-intelligence platform. Rosella is applying AI to commercial insurance brokerage, Kindling is creating an operating system for startup storytelling and communications, and Reinforce Labs is building tools for evaluating and securing enterprise AI systems.
Meanwhile, hiloop is developing infrastructure to help companies train, test and improve open-weight AI models at scale.
Deep tech and infrastructure
The cohort also includes startups focused on physical-world infrastructure.
Puralink is building autonomous robots that inspect underground pipe networks, while ULOOK is developing satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence.
“What stands out about Surge 12 is that these founders are building from first principles,” said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director at Peak XV and Surge.
“We are seeing new behaviours emerge around how people create, shop, date, invest and access healthcare, alongside fundamental changes in how companies hire, insure and operate. AI is increasingly becoming the architecture of the product rather than the product itself."
Experienced founders
The cohort includes several repeat founders and experienced operators.
Kello Co-founder Mona Gandhi was Airbnb's first female engineer and previously founded Upraised, while co-founder Subramanya Jingade earlier co-founded AmbitionBox.
Reinforce Labs Founder Anish Das Sarma holds a PhD from Stanford, previously built a company acquired by Airbnb and later led AI and machine-learning teams at Google.
Alma founders Nischith Shadagopan and Vinod Ganesan previously worked at Microsoft Research before becoming founding engineers at Sarvam AI. GameStock founder Antoine Mistico is a serial entrepreneur and former professional baseball player, while ULOOK's founders have collectively worked on more than a dozen satellite missions.
Hoola Health founder Deeksha Senguttuvan grew up in a family that operated hospitals, while Puralink founder Harrison Crowe-Maxwell transformed university research on robotic pipe inspection into the company's patented technology.
