Peak XV Partners is revamping Surge, its once-ambitious seed-investing platform, built to offer a Y Combinator-style launchpad for Indian and Southeast Asian startups, people aware of the development said.
The VC firm is expected to bring Surge closer to the firm’s broader early-stage investment practice, with members of its venture or early stage investing team taking greater responsibility for sourcing, sponsoring, and supporting seed deals, they said.
The shift follows a string of exits from the team that ran or worked closely with Surge, slower cohort intake since 2024, and a reduction in dedicated operating support for the accelerator-style platform, they said.
Aaditya Sood, one of the last senior executives closely associated with Surge, has not been active for at least eight months, sources said.
Rajan Anandan, managing director of Peak XV Partners, said Sood “is very much with Peak XV but has transitioned to an advisory role for a set period of time.”
Anandan also denied that Surge is being reduced or folded into the broader firm.
“Surge has always been Peak XV’s approach to seed-stage investing and company-building,” he said in response to ET’s queries. “What has evolved is the way we support founders as their needs change.”
Surge was launched in 2019 by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, which was rebranded Peak XV in 2023 , as a rapid scale-up programme for early-stage startups, combining $1.5 million in seed capital with company-building workshops, mentors, global immersion, and a founder community. At the time, the VC’s managing director Shailendra Singh, in a blog, said Surge would have two cohorts a year, each comprising 10-20 firms.
Peak XV’s ambitions for Surge were bigger then. ET had reported in April 2019 that Sequoia India, after roping in Anandan from Google India to lead Surge, was expected to raise a separate $150-200 million fund for the programme, its maiden seed fund in India. The separate Surge fund did not materialise in that form.
Since the start of 2024, Surge has run one cohort a year, compared with the earlier two-cohort annual rhythm, people familiar with the matter said.
Anandan said Peak XV does not view Surge as a calendar-led product. “We are not prescriptive about running one or two cohorts in a calendar year. We do not measure Surge by the number of cohorts a year,” he said. “We measure it by the quality of founders we partner with and the depth of support they receive.”
Executive churn
Over the past two years, several partners and associates who were part of the platform or worked closely with Surge, such as Pieter Kemps, Prachi Pawar, Anandamoy Roychowdhary and Vedant Trivedi have left the firm.
People aware of the changes said Surge is expected to become leaner, with fewer dedicated resources.
Anandan, however, said Peak XV continues to provide Surge-backed founders support across hiring, product, go-to-market, marketing, communications, brand, policy, and global expansion. “Being connected to the full Peak XV platform gives Surge founders more depth, not less,” he said.
The allocation for Surge and seed investments from Peak XV’s new fund is expected to be about $225 million, compared with $300 million set aside in 2022 when Sequoia Capital India raised a $2.85 billion fund , people aware of the matter said.
Peak XV’s new fund is also smaller, with the firm announcing $1.3 billion in new capital commitments across its India Seed, India Venture, and APAC funds in February.
Anandan declined to comment on internal allocation numbers, but said seed remains an important part of Peak XV’s strategy. He said Surge can now invest up to $5 million per company, compared with up to $3 million earlier.
The recalibration comes as large venture firms are reworking their seed-stage platforms. ET reported that funding across seed-to-series B startups rose 46% to $879 million in FY26 , even as deal count fell to 129 from 192, pointing to fewer but larger early-stage bets.
Accel Atoms, Accel Partners’ pre-seed programme launched in 2021 , said in November that it is partnering with Google’s AI Futures Fund for an India AI cohort, offering capital, Gemini access, and technical support.
Accel also teamed up with Prosus for Atoms X to co-invest in frontier tech startups with cheques of $200,000-$2 million, in March this year.
Meanwhile, Lightspeed Venture Partners launched India Ascends in December last year for young deeptech founders, in partnership with Anthropic, Groq, Google Cloud, and AWS.
