Bengaluru, Aug 22 (IANS): Surge, which is Sequoia India and Southeast Asia's rapid scale-up programme, on Monday launched its seventh cohort, featuring 37 founders across 15 early-stage startups.

One-third of the startups include at least one female founder and several startups have second and third time founders.

Surge startups have collectively raised over $1.7 billion in follow-on funding to date, with over 60 per cent of companies from the first five cohorts raising their series A and beyond.

"We have partnered with all of our companies at their earliest stage of company building, with nearly half of them still in pre-launch at the start of our partnerships," said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Sequoia India & Southeast Asia, and Surge.

‘We believe that these dreamers, innovators and category creators have the potential to change the future of our region and the world," Anandan added.

With the seventh cohort, the community now includes 281 founders from 127 startups across 16 sectors.

One-third of the startups in the seventh cohort have at least one female founder, according to the VC fund.

The cohort includes the former CFO of Nykaa, Uber's first engineers in India, software engineers who helped build Apache Hive, an aerospace engineer turned fintech founder, and machine learning engineers who worked on conversational AI at Facebook.

‘Surge 07' is currently in progress and founders are going through a rigorous 16-week hybrid programme, the VC fund informed.

Past speakers and mentors in the programme include Amrish Rau (Pinelabs), Ashwini Asokan (vue.ai/Mad Street Den), Binny Bansal (Flipkart), Byju Raveendran (BYJU'S), Doug Leone (Sequoia Capital), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Kunal Shah (CRED) and Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), among others.

Surge Surge combines up to $3 million of seed capital with company-building workshops, a global curriculum and support from a community of exceptional mentors and founders.