The origins of Surge

It all started one ordinary day in college. I stumbled upon the Bitcoin Whitepaper and found myself fascinated by Satoshi Nakamoto's work. I'm just kidding 🤣; I'm not here to tell yet another Whitepaper story.

Co-founders back story

Hi, I'm Yash, the Co-Founder & CEO of Surge. I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and spent my college days building everything from fest enrollment platforms to hackathon projects. After graduating in 2012, I worked as a full-stack developer specializing in JavaScript for 3-4 years. My knack for turning concepts into market-ready products led me to collaborate with visionary entrepreneurs and forward-thinking startups. This journey culminated in successfully running a product studio with a team of over 50 for 4-5 years, honing my entrepreneurial, operational, and product development skills and preparing me for my next career move.

During this journey, Punith (Co-Founder & CTO) joined as a Tech Co-founder, complementing the skills to accelerate. At the core, Punith is a problem solver and a techie with deep expertise in Objective-C, Javascript, Go, Rust, and other programming languages.

In 2020, we launched a team collaboration software. While the venture didn't soar as high as we had hoped, it was a valuable learning experience. It taught me the importance of product market fit, the challenges of scaling, and the resilience needed to navigate setbacks, all of which have shaped my entrepreneurial journey.

Into Web3 Rabbit hole

I had the chance to reconnect with an old friend and former colleague, Ravindra. Now an entrepreneur himself, Ravindra has achieved success with his product, the Frontier Wallet, and has even been listed in Binance. While his story served as an inspiration , the underlying themes on the projects he was working on concerning decentralization and self-custody strongly intrigued me.

Having sparked a newfound interest in Web3, my co-founder and I dove deep into exploring this space. Soon, our team began working with Frontier Wallet as an external team. This multi-ecosystem wallet gave us a deep understanding of Web3 fundamentals and infrastructure. We are incredibly grateful for this opportunity and the experience it brought us.

Stealth Mode

With a firm conviction in Web3 and its ability to impact our advancement, we re-started our product journey in July 2023, focusing on scaling solutions, wallet infra, and tooling. During stealth, we worked on various ideas & experimented.

• A Rollup-as-a-service for OP Stack. Built, got feedback from Optimism.

• MPC-TSS-based Wallets and Infra

• Layer 2 specific explorer and smart contract toolings. Collaborated with Blockscout, Manta, and a few other L2 solutions.

• Meta aggregator for cross-chain liquidity, including Bitcoin.

During this period, we explored multiple accelerators like Alliance, YC, Orange DAO, etc.

ETH Denver, a turning point

During the ETH Denver hackathon 2024, we focused on Bitcoin, developing cross-chain liquidity swaps and a bridge. We had a solid understanding of scaling in Bitcoin, Ordinals, and L2s. Bridging Bitcoin presented a significant opportunity, as most existing solutions were centralized or federated multi-sig. We created an MPC-TSS-based Bitcoin to Bitcoin L2 bridge, which received strong community validation. By the way, we placed third in the hackathon! :)

This success led us to spend more time refining the idea. After numerous experiments in stealth mode, our efforts culminated in Surge, a Bitcoin Rollup-as-a-service.

First Cheque and Beyond.

Once we solidified our idea and were confident in our ability to take it to the moon, we began reaching out to potential backers. Sam Thapaliya and Galen were the first to join our mission with their investment.

We are thrilled about the opportunity ahead. With Bitcoin being the most decentralized, holding high brand equity, and poised for mass adoption, scaling is the natural next step. The Bitcoin L2 landscape is heating up, with many contenders vying for the top spots. While a few general-purpose Bitcoin L2s like Optimism, Arbitrum on Ethereum will emerge, we are betting on a long tail of app-specific rollups tailored to Bitcoin's unique attributes.

LFG 🚀