Building the next era of AI, deeptech, consumer and fintech

We’re excited to welcome 18 new companies to Surge 12, building across AI, robotics, space, consumer, healthcare, music and fintech.

Every Surge cohort gives us a window into what ambitious early-stage founders are choosing to build right now. With Surge 12, three shifts stood out to us.

Familiar consumer behaviours are being rebuilt around new expectations. AI is moving from a feature to the underlying architecture of products. And technology is increasingly leaving the screen to tackle physical infrastructure and the real world.

Across all three, there’s a common instinct: start from first principles.

Our Surge founders are asking whether the products and systems we’ve grown accustomed to should work the way they do at all, and what they might look like if they were being built from scratch today.

Rebuilding familiar behaviours

Some of the companies in Surge 12 are taking experiences we already know well and rethinking how they should work.

August AI is building autonomous clinical intelligence for primary care, combining AI with physician-led care. The company has already grown to nine million users across 160 countries.

Ditto is moving dating beyond endless swiping, while Wingit is building a beauty platform for India’s premium consumers.

GameStock is applying the mechanics of competition to financial markets, and Hoola Health is building a child-first paediatric care ecosystem.

Riffle is creating an infinite musical space to record ideas, layer sounds, collaborate live and share tracks, all in one browser.

And Tribe Money wants to put personal finances on autopilot, using AI to manage the tracking, research and investing decisions that often fall through the cracks.

What connects these companies isn’t a single category or technology. It’s a willingness to question familiar behaviours and build around how people want to live, create and transact today.

AI is becoming the architecture

AI runs through much of Surge 12, but increasingly not as a standalone product or feature.

It is becoming part of the underlying architecture.

Alma is rethinking personal computing for an AI-native world.

Kello is building a people intelligence engine designed to unlock human potential at scale.

Rosella is redesigning commercial insurance brokerage around AI, while Kindling is building a storytelling operating system for ambitious tech startups.

Reinforce Labs is building the evaluation, red-teaming and remediation layer for enterprise AI, helping teams make AI systems safer and more reliable in production.

And hiloop is building infrastructure for post-training open-weight models, a research harness that helps application-layer AI companies run, track and improve model experiments at scale.

Together, these companies reflect a shift we think is becoming increasingly important: AI is moving from being the product itself to becoming part of how the product fundamentally works.

Technology is leaving the screen

Some of the most ambitious companies in this cohort are working on problems that cannot be solved through software alone.

Puralink is building autonomous robots that navigate underground pipe networks, giving infrastructure operators visibility into assets that have historically been difficult to inspect without excavation.

ULOOK is building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence from space.

From robotics beneath our cities to sensing systems above the Earth, these founders are showing how advances in hardware, software and AI are opening up entirely new categories of problems for startups to tackle.

Founders who have been here before, and founders who have lived the problem

As with previous Surge cohorts, Surge 12 brings together an unusually experienced group of founders and builders.

Mona Gandhi, co-founder of Kello, was Airbnb’s first female engineer and also founded Upraised. Her co-founder Subramanya Jingade previously co-founded AmbitionBox.

Anish Das Sarma, founder of Reinforce Labs, completed a PhD at Stanford, built a company that was acquired by Airbnb and later led AI and machine-learning teams as a Director at Google.

Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan, founders of Alma, previously worked together at Microsoft Research and became founding engineers at Sarvam AI.

Antoine Mistico, founder of GameStock, is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.

The founders of ULOOK have worked across more than a dozen satellite missions, while hiloop’s founding team includes former Reducto engineers and a Cambridge computer science PhD completed at 24.

But experience is only part of the story.

Many founders in Surge 12 also have a deeply personal connection to the problems they are solving.

Hoola Health founder Deeksha Senguttuvan grew up in a family that built a hospital group. Harrison Crowe-Maxwell has been building robots since childhood and turned his UTS capstone research on robot mobility inside pipes into Puralink’s patented drive technology.

These are founders who have worked inside the industries they are changing, lived with the problems themselves, or spent years developing the technical insight required to see a different way forward.

Building from first principles

As our MD Rajan Anandan put it:

“What stands out about Surge 12 is that these founders are building these companies on first principles. They are questioning whether the underlying experience should work that way at all.”

We’re seeing new behaviours emerge around how people create, shop, date, invest and access healthcare, alongside fundamental changes in how companies hire, insure and operate. AI is a major enabler, but increasingly it is becoming the architecture of the product rather than the product itself.

What connects this cohort is the depth of insight these founders bring and their ambition to build something fundamentally better.

Three companies in Surge 12 are still building in stealth: an Applied AI lab, an education company and a medical products company. We can’t wait to share more about them in time.

For now, we’re delighted to welcome all 18 companies and their founders to Surge 12.

Welcome to Surge!