Sequoia India, SEA announces second cohort of Spark Fellowship
- ByStartupStory | January 19, 2023
Sequoia India and Southeast Asia have launched the second cohort of the Sequoia Spark Fellowship, a $100,000 equity-free grant and mentorship programme, with the goal of inspiring more women in India and Southeast Asia to become entrepreneurs. Sequoia Spark is a year-long initiative that combines money with deep, immersive mentorship to encourage more women entrepreneurs in India and Southeast Asia. For the course of the programme, each founder has been paired with a seasoned startup founder from Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s portfolio for one-on-one mentorship. Among those on the list are Anshuman Singh of Scaler, Ashwini Asokan of Mad Street Den, Chaitanya Ramalingegowda of Wakefit, Hande Cilingir of Insider.in, Siu Rui of Carousell, and Yamini Bhat of Vymo.
In addition, they will receive mentorship throughout the programme from a senior Sequoia India and Southeast Asia investment advisor. Additionally, a few Surge sessions will be available to Spark 02 founders, and they will receive mentoring in hiring, product, legal, finance, product, technology, and marketing from Sequoia India and Southeast Asia portfolio specialists. Spark 02 is made up of 12 driven female founders who are tackling issues in a variety of fields and businesses, including healthtech, SaaS, B2B, Web3, consumer internet, and direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketing.
Spark 01 cohort ended in December 2022, with 10 of the 15 startups raising their seed and Series A rounds while one was recently acquired. The company confirmed a total of $51 million of capital was invested post-Spark.
“We are thrilled about the success of the first cohort and incredibly excited about the potential of the Spark 02 founders,” said Sakshi Chopra, MD, Sequoia India. “The Sequoia Spark fellowship programme is born out of the desire and commitment to increase the number of female founders in the region and play a role in enabling the early stages of their journey, especially when access is such a challenge.
These are the 12 startups that make up Spark 02, the second round of Sequoia Spark fellows.
Avataar is a platform that offers men and women alike at-home, full-spectrum, tech-enabled, cutting-edge, non-invasive skin treatments with indisputable results. It was founded in 2022 by Saumya Avataar.
In order to enable employees to interact, learn, and grow while becoming more productive, BHyve, founded in 2021 by Ketaki Ogale, is constructing intelligent knowledge-sharing networks—knowledge management systems for the future of work.
Hoop—Hoop is a health and wellness firm that Twinkle Uppal launched last year with the intention of serving young Indians.
Jollee was established in 2022 by Akriti Gupta as a personalised shopping assistant for children’s needs that gives parents individualised advice on what would be ideal for their child.
Mantys is a business planning and analytics solution for mid-market organisations. Mantys was founded in 2022 by Kriti Arora. The SaaS platform enables businesses to gather and keep track of all of their data, including financial and operational KPIs, in one location and in real-time.
Plodo is a platform that assists consumer businesses with a strong online presence in beginning offline operations in India. Eisha Srivastava founded it in 2022, and with it, independent brands may connect and gain immediate access to offline retail channels.
Teleport is a travel-tech start-up that Nikita Dresswala founded in 2022 with the goal of streamlining documentation processes, delivering trustworthy information, and offering a user-friendly platform for applying.
Neha Jain founded Zerocircle in 2022 to assist responsible companies in a variety of industries in implementing low-carbon materials sourced from renewable resources like seaweed.
Ailiverse is a SaaS company that makes deep learning available to all businesses. It was established by Fannie Lin in 2022 and uses its own patented technique for unsupervised domain adaptation, allowing businesses to create computer vision models with only 10% of the data normally needed.
Fairatmos—Fairatmos is an Indonesian project aggregator for carbon offsets. The company was established in 2022 by Natalia Rialucky Marsudi with the goal of creating a climate-tech impact organisation that would be the largest marketplace for carbon credits and a technology supplier of high-caliber projects.
Gigit.ai is a Web3 startup for gig economy employees in Southeast Asia, founded in 2022 by Inez Wihardjo. Democratizing the gig economy is the objective. It is a two-sided market with AI firms on one side that need data to be labelled and gathered and workers on the other side who can fill this demand using a mobile-first solution.
Little Joy is a mom-and-baby commerce firm and a digital-first ecosystem that focuses on the first 1,000 days of a child’s development. It was founded in 2021 by Carina Lukito (the most essential period in human development to avoid malnutrition).
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