After a successful launch of the first cohort of the accelerator program, Surge, Sequoia has selected 20 startups under the second edition. Among them, 13 startups have been picked up from India, whereas rest belongs to Southeast Asia.
While the startups from the first cohort are still growing and raising fresh capital from the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, selected startups from the second batch also started receiving capital from Sequoia Capital.
Kicking off the first funding round soon after getting a seat in Surge, Bijak, an agritech platform, has raised $2.5 million (Rs 18.5 crore) from Surge Venture II and Omidyar Network. Surge invested Rs 10.7 crore while the rest came from Omidyar.
It’s worth noting that Omidyar is an existing investor in the company. Better Capital and Nipun Mehra also participated in the round.
According to RoC filing with MCA, the Gurugram-based startup has allotted 2942 seed CCPS at a price of Rs 48,516.79 per share and at an interest rate of 0.001%.
Sequoia, through Surge, had picked up startups from diverse sectors such as consumer internet, edtech, agritech, clean energy, social commerce, fintech, SaaS, robotic, and DTC brands.
Bijak is a B2B platform for agricultural commodities that gives buyers and sellers better prices, improve their working capital cycle and optimised logistics.
Founded in January 2019 and formally launched in May by Nukul Upadhye, Mahesh Jakhotia, Jitender Bedwal, Daya Rai and Nikhil Tripathi, Bijak essentially provides quick time disbursal of loan, reduces cost, eliminate wastage via logistics and convenient payment channel and works as a bookkeeping app.
Already backed by the likes of Omidyar, Omnivore Partners, Bijak app is available in several local languages and caters people in the agricultural-rich states like Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar and Uttarakhand.
Apart from Bijak, Neo banking startup Juno and unified data platform Hevo Data, which were also selected under Surge second edition, had raised seed capital.
*We have updated the post to reflect that Bijak has raised $2.5 million.
