Bangladeshi startups 10 Minute School and Shajgoj get into the latest cohort of Sequoia India’s accelerator program Surge.
Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s accelerator program, has unveiled the 20 early-stage startups selected for its sixth cohort. The group has received a total funding of US$60 million from Surge and its co-investors.
EdTech startup 10 Minute School and content and commerce focused fashion startup Shajgoj are two startups from Bangladesh that have been selected in the cohort. Previously B2B commerce startup ShopUp attended Surge from Bangladesh.
Announcing the cohort Surge writes on its website:
“Surge 06 includes the largest number of software startups so far; more than half the startups in this cohort are building and providing cloud infrastructure, developer tools, data security and software as a service for global customers. As many products and services continue to move online, we’re starting to see greater diversity in the types of SaaS startups applying to and taking part in Surge. Notably, there are four cybersecurity companies in this cohort, each focused on a different aspect of security in response to society’s changing needs.
There’s also an exciting set of startups in FinTech, AgTech, e-commerce, DTC brands and Edtech in Surge 06 that have set out to solve a broad range of problems both regionally and across the world. Sixty percent of Surge 06 companies are building solutions for global markets from Day One.
This batch of startups is also geographically diverse. As with prior cohorts, 50% of companies are based in India, and for the very first time we have startups from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan.
We continue to have an ‘open architecture’ approach at Surge, inviting co-investors to partner with our startups. Seventeen of them are coming into the program with institutional and angel co-investors, raising about $60 million in their Surge round from Surge and these co-investors.”
Here are the startups in the cohort:
10 Minute School: Founded by Abdullah Raied and Ayman Sadiq, 10 Minute School provides affordable and accessible education for K-12 school and college students, university admission test candidates, job-seekers and people looking for specialized skills training in Bangladesh.
Airavana: Founded by Ashish Verma and Kedar Kekan, Airavana reduces privacy risks and improves data security while providing customer data discovery across more than 150 cloud applications.
Aqgromalin: Founded by Bharani CL and Prasanna Manogaran, Aqgromalin is building a full stack AgTech platform that helps farmers diversify into animal husbandry and aquaculture.
BambooBox: Founded by Ankur Saigal and Divyesh Dixit, BambooBox is an AI-powered SaaS platform that helps companies build high-quality pipelines through engagement across an entire account, rather than a single lead.
BiteSpeed: Founded by Vinayak Aggarwal, BiteSpeed is building a conversational commerce stack for D2C brands. Their platform enables online brands to interact with their customers and sell their products on apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Blend: Founded by Jamsheed Kamardeen, Vaibhav Prakash and Vishwanath Kollapudi, Blend is on a mission to turn every online seller into an e-commerce pro with an AI graphic design and marketing app that creates product visuals, social graphics, product descriptions and ads in seconds.
Canary Mail: Founded by Dev Sanghani and Sohel Sanghani, Canary Mail is reimagining email security for modern businesses and individuals. With easy to use email encryption, protection from inbound threats, and human error prevention, Canary Mail delivers 360 degree email security and helps achieve regulatory compliance without compromising on user experience.
Checkbox: Founded by Evan Wong and James Han, Checkbox is a no-code Expert Process Automation (EPA) platform enabling business users to develop their own tools and software using intuitive ‘drag and drop’ technology.
Cooby: Founded by Jocelin Ho and Wen Shaw, Cooby is re-imagining sales management for a messaging-first world by building the best-in-class engagement and team management solutions on top of popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and LINE.
Grupin: Founded by Kevin Sandjaja and Ricky Christie, Grupin is a social commerce platform based in Indonesia that offers an interactive, community-based shopping experience to consumers, along with the benefit of large discounts on bulk consumer products.
HelloMida: Founded by Grace Yun Xia, HelloMida is a DTC fashion brand, built on a Real Time Retail model, that empowers Southeast Asia’s digitally native Gen Z consumers to express and celebrate their individualism.
IIMMPACT: Founded by Alex Tan and Kelvin Lee, IIMMPACT is a one stop platform for payments and data aggregation for Southeast Asian companies. Their mission is to help companies in the region build fintech solutions by providing a full suite of world class APIs ranging from mobile top-ups, utility bills, government services, insurance and travel under one umbrella.
Infina: Founded by James Vuong, Infina is a retail investing app that makes it easy for young, tech-savvy Vietnamese to start their investing journey with minimal risk.
Manatal: Founded by Jeremy Fichet and Yassine Bel Mamoun, Manatal, an end-to-end recruitment and onboarding SaaS platform, is on a mission to transform how the world recruits.
Peakperformer: Founded by Aishwarya Goel and Nilesh Agarwal, Peakperformer is on a mission to democratize leadership coaching for managers at all levels and help them build behavioral skills in an engaging, measurable and continuous manner. This digital coaching platform enables organizations to create strong leaders at all career levels.
ScanPay: Founded by Venkat Paruchuri, ScanPay aims to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) accept payments from customers seamlessly using just a smartphone.
Shajgoj: Founded by Milky Mahmud, Nazmul Sheik and Sinthia Islam, Shajgoj is on a mission to inspire every woman to celebrate beauty with confidence by providing authentic products at reasonable prices from renowned brands and local distributors through their physical stores and online platforms.
Toplyne: Founded by Rishen Kapoor, Rohit Khanna and Ruchin Kulkarni, Toplyne helps revenue teams at product-led SaaS companies to convert freemium users to paid subscribers.
Two startups in the cohort are in stealth mode: a cybersecurity company and a cloud security management company
