Surge, Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Southeast Asia’s rapid expansion program launched its seventh phase, investing in 15 early-stage startups.

Surge 07 founders are tackling climate change with Asia Pacific’s first AI-driven decarbonisation platform. This includes helping people with no design experience create 3D animations anywhere in the world, allowing startups to create 3D animations in minutes and days while Not building machine learning projects in a few months. This also involves facilitating one-click checkout in SEA, building Indonesia’s first teen-oriented fintech company; for Indonesia’s agricultural sector and those that will bring the next 10 million developers into the Web3 space People build full-stack technology solutions.

According to Sequoia, Surge 07 startups include vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Attentive, fintech Beam, automated platform boxes, B2B revenue services company BuyerAssist, AI-based collaboration platform ClearFeed, AI-based video creation platform Gan and Saas firm Hatica.

Fintech companies Whiz, Unravel Carbon, TrueFoundry, Semaai, Pratech Brands, PixCap and Metaschool, are also part of the Surge 07 cohort.

“Surge has grown rapidly over the past three years, and in its seventh cohort, the community now includes 281 founders from 127 startups across 16 industries,” the investment firm said in a media statement on August 22.”

“Founders are also increasingly targeting their businesses on the world stage. Most companies are building for the global market from day one and targeting audiences beyond their headquarters, with nearly half of them operating in the US and European markets,” Anandan said.

Nearly half of the Surge 07 companies were pre-release when Surge partnered with them. Some are second or third-time founders, and some start their startups right out of college.

The cohort includes a former CFO of Nykaa, Uber‘s first engineers in India, a software engineer who helped build Apache Hive, a fintech founder turned aerospace engineer, and a machine learning engineer working on conversational AI at Facebook. Moreover, a third of the startups in this cohort had at least one female founder.

The statement said that Surge 07 is currently underway, and the founders are going through a rigorous 16-week mixing programme.

In January, Sequoia launched its sixth cohort of startups from SaaS, developer tools, cybersecurity, edtech, D2C, fintech, and agtech.