Peak XV Partners, one of the largest venture capital firms investing in markets including India and Southeast Asia with more than $10 billion in assets under management, has increased how much it invests per startup through Surge, its seed-stage investing platform, as it unveils a new cohort of 18 companies.

At least three of the companies in this cohort had already raised outside funding, in some cases from Peak XV itself, before joining Surge.

The new batch, called Surge 12, is the first to operate under Peak XV’s higher investment ceiling of up to $5 million per company, up from $3 million previously. The venture firm invested more than $50 million across the cohort, which has collectively raised over $90 million in seed funding, according to Peak XV. Its median investment per company has also increased, though the firm declined to disclose the figure.

“The bar to raise a Series A has gone up pretty significantly,” Rajan Anandan (pictured above), managing director at Peak XV, said in an interview. He added that the firm is also seeing more capital-intensive companies, particularly in deeptech, that are raising larger rounds at the seed stage.

Surge has become more global with each cohort, Anandan told TechCrunch, with its latest group spanning founders and companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Just five of the 18 startups in Surge 12 are focused on the Indian market, while more than half of the companies are based in India. The remaining 13 target global markets, highlighting the difference between where the companies are built and where they expect to find customers.

Since its launch in 2019, when Peak XV operated as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, Surge has backed more than 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs representing more than 18 nationalities. Peak XV says the 10 largest companies to emerge from those cohorts now generate more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue.

Anandan described Surge as one way Peak XV invests at the seed stage, alongside its standard seed investing, while the firm still remains an investor as companies progress through later funding rounds. The founders it backs typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialized technical founders, he said, with about 50% to 60% of a typical cohort made up of people coming from operating roles at established technology companies.

This cohort’s startups span AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech, ranging from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots built for underground pipes and satellites designed to detect radio-frequency signals from orbit.

The Surge 12 cohort

Alma — founded by Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan — is building a personal computing platform focused on making computer use faster and more affordable. Its founders previously worked at Microsoft Research and were founding engineers at Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup building AI models for Indian languages.

August AI — founded by Anuruddh Mishra, an IIT-BHU alumnus who started the company in 2022 after a personal medical misdiagnosis — provides a healthcare platform that combines AI with physician-led care, reaching over 9 million users across 160 countries.

Ditto — founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu — works as an AI dating matchmaker inside iMessage, aimed at helping college students turn digital introductions into in-person connections. (TechCrunch wrote more about this one last month.) The company had already raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round announced earlier this year.

GameStock — founded by Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana, and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad — brings competition mechanics to financial markets, turning investing and trading into a more competitive experience. Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.

HiLoop — founded by Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar, and Thomas Boser — helps AI companies adapt general-purpose open-weight models for specific applications using its post-training platform. Its founding team includes former Reducto engineers and a Cambridge computer science PhD who completed his doctorate at 24.

Hoola Health — founded by Deeksha Senguttuva — focuses on care for children and their families, providing consultations, vaccinations, medicines, diagnostics, developmental therapy, and dental services on a single platform. Senguttuvan grew up around healthcare, as her family built and operated a hospital group.

Kello — founded by Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade — is building an AI-powered talent-discovery platform focused on identifying a candidate’s potential and trajectory rather than relying primarily on conventional credentials. Gandhi says she was Airbnb’s first female engineer and she previously founded Upraised, while Jingade previously co-founded AmbitionBox.

Kindling — founded by Adam Miller and Sachin Shah — is building what it calls a “storytelling operating system” for technology startups, using AI to help companies develop and produce their communications and content.

Puralink — founded by Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz, and Thien “Long” Tran — is developing autonomous robots that can navigate underground pipe networks. Crowe-Maxwell has been building robots since childhood and turned university research into the patented drive technology behind the startup.

Reinforce Labs — founded by Anish Das Sarma — is developing tools to evaluate, red-team, and remediate enterprise AI systems. Sarma previously founded a company acquired by Airbnb and later served as a director at Google, where he led AI and machine-learning teams.

Riffle — founded by Anurag Choudhary and deo — is building a browser-based platform where musicians can create, collaborate on, and share music, reducing the need to move between separate tools during the creative process.

Rosella — founded by Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart — is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses, using AI to automate parts of the traditionally manual process of finding and placing business insurance. Rosella raised a roughly $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital earlier this year.

Tribe Money — founded by Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker — gives an AI-powered personal finance platform that helps users track their money, research investments and make investing decisions.

ULOOK — founded by Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik — is building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence, targeting customers globally. Its founders have worked on more than 12 satellite missions. The company had already raised roughly $2.3 million in seed funding from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures before joining Surge.

Wingit — founded by Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal — is building a beauty platform aimed at India’s growing premium-consumer market. It is focused on how consumers discover and shop for higher-end beauty products.

Three other startups in the cohort have yet to publicly reveal their names or products. Peak XV said they are working in education, applied AI, and medical products.

OpenAI had planned to release yet another AI model next month, but has decided to nix the release over safety concerns.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Astra 6.1 was scheduled to be released as soon as within the next few days. However, the model “showed higher levels of deception” than previous models and exhibited unsafe behavior, the Journal writes.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told the WSJ that the model tested poorly on alignment, a measure of how well the program adheres to human intent.

TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information and will update the article if it responds.

Astra was released earlier this month and hailed by OpenAI as its most powerful model yet.

Questions about safety have plagued the AI industry over the past several months — ever since the Hugging Face incident, in which an OpenAI agent broke free of its sandboxed environment and hacked several different companies. Since that incident, more models — including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini — have been revealed to have exhibited similar behavior.

The deluge of concerning stories has, ironically, helped to push the policy conversation in the U.S. toward an outcome desired by top AI labs: the institution of new industry standards for AI safety and potentially a slowdown of the industry itself.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have claimed that the concern here is safety, although another potential motivation posited by critics is that it could entrench the industry position of those companies at the detriment of less resourced firms.

Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora told investors last week that it expects to have more than 30,000 self-driving trucks on the road generating $5 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2030 — an audacious plan considering it expects to end 2026 with just 200 driverless trucks and an $80 million revenue run rate.

CFO David Maday contends the seemingly outsized target isn’t as large or as out of reach as it might appear.

“While 30,000 kind of feels like a lot — and it does in the autonomy space for sure — in terms of trucks relative to the overall market, it’s kind of pretty small,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview, adding that the four major truck manufacturers produce anywhere between 250,000 and 300,000 new trucks a year. “I don’t think it’s aspirational,” he added, “I think we can do it.”

Investors haven’t exactly embraced Aurora’s 2030 vision. Shares have continued to slide since the company’s annual analyst and investor day on September 23. On Monday, shares closed down 12.42%, to $5.29.

But investors have time to come around and, according to Maday, the big “unlock” for Aurora starts in 2027 and accelerates from there. The company expects to go from 200 driverless trucks at the end of 2026 to more than 1,000 a year later.

Today, Aurora operates what it calls a transportation-as-a-service business — a proof-of-concept model that it plans to limit to about 500 trucks. It owns and operates the self-driving trucks and charges its customers, including Detmar Logistics, Hirschbach, McLane, and Werner about a $2 per mile, a rate that includes a fuel surcharge.

That works out to roughly the same rates as other carriers’ typical pricing. The real shift — and the real savings, Maday says — will happen next year as when Aurora begins moving to a driver-as-a-service model. Instead of Aurora owning the trucks, customers will buy the self-driving trucks and pay Aurora a per-mile subscription fee for the self-driving technology, which the company expects to be about $0.85. Under this model, the customers will own and maintain the truck, while Aurora maintains the self-driving system and its accompanying hardware.

Moving the trucks off Aurora’s balance sheet is critical if the company wants to scale — and it’s likely what investors are paying attention to. The company said it expects to reach breakeven gross margins (meaning revenue would cover the direct costs of running the trucks) on a run-rate basis in the first half of 2027 with around 500 trucks on the road.

The next big leap comes at the end of 2027 with Aurora’s third-generation hardware— the sensors, computers, and other equipment that let its trucks drive themselves — which will be mass-produced autonomous vehicle hardware built by its partner, Aumovio (formerly known as Continental). Aumovio isn’t just engineering and manufacturing the hardware kit; the company is also financing it for Aurora — easing the financial burden on the self-driving truck company. Aumovio will also service and repair the kits for customers.

Aurora plans to expand its operations at the same time. By 2030, the company expects to grow beyond a few states in the South to the vast majority of the continental U.S., according to Maday.

“By 2028, I expect that our cost structures are going to be really outstanding, that’s why you see our gross margin starting to take off …” Maday said. “Once you get to that point, I think going into ride hailing is fine,” he said, confirming that Aurora still plans to eventually enter the robotaxi market.