Sequoia India raises $195m for latest seed fund

Sequoia set up Surge in January 2019 and closed its debut seed fund six months later at INR14 billion ($193 million). The idea is to make investments of $1-2 million while providing mentorship from leading founders in Sequoia’s regional network.

Surge is intended to expand the firm's support for entrepreneurs through the most difficult stages of building a business. It picks 10-20 start-ups for each biannual cohort that will receive seed investments from Sequoia and mentorship from founders of successful regional start-ups.

Sequoia describes Surge as having “open architecture” that allows for collaboration with other seed funds and angel investors. It has partnered with more than 100 co-investors to date, supporting 69 start-ups in over 15 sectors. One-third of these are focused on software-as-a-service, while 25% are in consumer internet, 13% are in consumer brands, and 12% are in B2B services.

Start-ups from the first four cohorts have raised a combined total of $172 million in their seed rounds. According to a statement, 30 of the 52 start-ups from our first three cohorts went on to receive $390 million in follow-on capital after the program.

Some of the bigger successes have charted valuation increases of more than 10x. Sequoia said the average valuation growth for those receiving follow-on capital is 3-4x. Standouts seeing recent traction include Indonesian micro-hotel operator Bobobox, Bangladeshi B2B platform ShopUp, and Khatabook, an Indian small business bookkeeping software provider that raised a $60 million Series B round last year.

Sequoia plans to make several changes to Surge in the near term. These include new offerings designed especially for engineers building pre-launch systems and improvements to the Surge founder networking app. The venture capital firm also plans to hire recruiters to help founders in its portfolio identify and attract talent to their start-ups.

Last year, Sequoia closed its latest set of flagship funds for India and Southeast Asia with $1.35 billion in commitments, including a $525 million early-stage vehicle and a $825 million growth-stage vehicle. This compares to a total of $890 million in the previous cycle.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Southeast Asia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• GPs
• India
• Sequoia Capital
• seed
• TMT