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Peak XV has announced Surge 12, the twelfth cohort of its seed-stage investing platform Surge, backing 18 early-stage startups building across AI, robotics, space, consumer, healthcare, music and fintech. The cohort reflects three broader shifts in early-stage technology: familiar consumer behaviours being rebuilt around new expectations, AI shifting from a product feature to underlying architecture, and technology increasingly moving beyond screens into physical infrastructure.
Among the startups rebuilding familiar behaviours are August AI, which combines AI with physician-led primary care and has grown to nine million users across 160 countries, and Ditto, an AI dating matchmaker built inside iMessage. Other companies include Wingit, a beauty platform for India’s premium consumers; GameStock, which applies competition mechanics to financial markets; Hoola Health, a child-first paediatric care platform; and Riffle, a browser-based collaborative music creation tool.
“What stands out about Surge 12 is that these founders are building these companies on first principles. AI is a major enabler, but increasingly it is becoming the architecture of the product rather than the product itself,” said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV and Surge.
On AI as underlying architecture, Alma is rebuilding personal computing for an AI-native world, Kello is building a people intelligence engine, Rosella is redesigning commercial insurance brokerage around AI, Kindling is building a storytelling operating system for startups, Reinforce Labs is building an evaluation and red-teaming layer for enterprise AI, and hiloop is building infrastructure for post-training open-weight AI models.
In the physical infrastructure space, Puralink is building autonomous robots to inspect underground pipe networks, while ULOOK is building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence.
The cohort includes several experienced founders: Mona Gandhi, co-founder of Kello, was Airbnb’s first female engineer and previously founded Upraised. Anish Das Sarma, founder of Reinforce Labs, holds a Stanford PhD, built a company acquired by Airbnb, and later led AI and machine-learning teams as a Director at Google. Alma’s founders, Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan, previously worked together at Microsoft Research before becoming founding engineers at Sarvam AI. GameStock founder Antoine Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player. Three companies in the cohort, spanning education, applied AI and medical products, remain in stealth.
Since its 2019 inception, Surge has grown to a community of over 180 startups across 18-plus nationalities, with its top 10 companies generating more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue. Surge provides up to $5 million in seed funding alongside hands-on support across hiring, product, engineering and go-to-market strategy.
Peak XV has announced Surge 12, the twelfth cohort of its seed-stage investing platform Surge, backing 18 early-stage startups building across AI, robotics, space, consumer, healthcare, music and fintech. The cohort reflects three broader shifts in early-stage technology: familiar consumer behaviours being rebuilt around new expectations, AI shifting from a product feature to underlying architecture, and technology increasingly moving beyond screens into physical infrastructure.
Among the startups rebuilding familiar behaviours are August AI, which combines AI with physician-led primary care and has grown to nine million users across 160 countries, and Ditto, an AI dating matchmaker built inside iMessage. Other companies include Wingit, a beauty platform for India’s premium consumers; GameStock, which applies competition mechanics to financial markets; Hoola Health, a child-first paediatric care platform; and Riffle, a browser-based collaborative music creation tool.
“What stands out about Surge 12 is that these founders are building these companies on first principles. AI is a major enabler, but increasingly it is becoming the architecture of the product rather than the product itself,” said Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV and Surge.
On AI as underlying architecture, Alma is rebuilding personal computing for an AI-native world, Kello is building a people intelligence engine, Rosella is redesigning commercial insurance brokerage around AI, Kindling is building a storytelling operating system for startups, Reinforce Labs is building an evaluation and red-teaming layer for enterprise AI, and hiloop is building infrastructure for post-training open-weight AI models.
