Private Equity International names Ros Bazany as Woman of Influence 2024

Jake Gibson, co-founder of Nerdwallet, shares the story of how messing around with a friend to fix a problem getting a credit card scaled into a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ.

ApniBus, which has been operating in stealth mode, is now live in more than 350 routes connecting over 1000 destinations. In just 7 months, the platform has seen over 1 million transactions and is growing rapidly month on month. They have perfected an operating playbook that ensures superior unit economics from day 1 and at scale. We are proud to back Sumit, Ravi and the ApniBus team from day zero of their journey transforming intercity travel for the next 400M Bharat travelers.

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We are thrilled to back 21-year-old award-winning game developers and designers, Harsh Savergaonkar and Aditya Kasibhatla, who, with Cricinshots aim to redefine gaming experiences for the next generation of gamers and cricket fans in India and beyond.

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We at Antler are thrilled to back Finverv on day zero of its journey of building the critical infrastructure needed for enabling thousands of organizations to offer credit to their customers and suppliers while helping lenders build profitable and scalable partnerships.  

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Sacha Michaud, co-founder of Glovo, shares the story of how this once humble delivery company grew into a billion-dollar logistics platform in Europe.

The Iberian ecosystem is attracting attention in the startup world with a staggering number of unicorns—startup companies with a value of more than $1 billion—and new funds in the past year. The combination of talent, capital, and startup-friendly governance has created a breeding ground for innovation.

India’s space tech industry is witnessing a paradigm shift driven by a factor common to most tech disruptions: a dramatic fall in cost. How will the confluence of multiple trends define the next era for space tech in India? Nitin Sharma (Partner, Antler India) and Rahul Seth (Scouting Director, Antler India) tackle these questions in the latest episode of Theory of Next. In a special section, Awais Ahmed (Co-founder and CEO, Pixxel) joins the team to talk about Mars colonization, asteroid mining, and space factories.

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At Antler, we believe every massively successful business begins with an exceptional founding team. In our experience, factors and traits that make founders stand apart vary widely—from excellence in education and a previous place of work to an extraordinary personal journey.

Antler has taken a systematic look at the exceptional founders whose companies crossed the legendary US$1 billion valuation mark in ecosystems around the world—DACH (Deutschland, Austria, and Switzerland) region (2022 and 2021), Africa, and Brazil—with the goal of identifying founder patterns that led to founding a unicorn.

This month, we explore Canada, delving into the backgrounds of local founders, the higher institutions they attended, their work experience before launching their ventures, and more. Globally, 2021 saw a record number of venture capital (VC) investments with more than $650 billion invested, minting close to 1,100 unicorns across the globe. Canada has followed suit.

Harpaul Sambhi dives into how he built Magical, a company focused on reducing monotony and pain in everyday tasks through simple, effective automation. At the time of recording, Magical had just raised $41 million in funding and automated over one billion tasks for more than 10,000 companies globally.

Now that the downturn is upon us, is it still the best time in history to build a business? Industry titans and Antler Board members James Anderson and Sheila Patel tackle crucial questions about the current markets, what they mean for founders and investors, and whether the golden age of innovation will persist through these rough seas.

At Antler India, we are particularly excited to back founders in areas such as SaaS, dev tooling, and Web3 infrastructure—with the vision of building critical infrastructure in India, for the world. To that end, we are thrilled to back Ronak, Debarshi, and the Adaptive team as they embark on a mission to empower technical and non-technical stakeholders at software companies globally.

For the second consecutive year, we took a systematic look at the founders behind unicorn and soonicorn companies in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). Just like in our inaugural DACH Unicorn Founder Roadmap released last year, we focus on the founders of the most valuable startups to better understand what makes these entrepreneurs and the companies they built so successful.

The Early Days podcast launched in June, unwrapping how world-class founders built today’s most influential companies. Antler’s Tyler Norwood, creator and host of the podcast, talks about what inspired it, why the early days are so crucial, and why it’s important to humanize startups.

Harvard Business School (HBS) recently published a case study about Antler’s fresh approach to early-stage venture capital. Antler Co-Founder Fridtjof Berge shares thoughts on how the case sparks discussion about the best ways to identify and support great people anywhere on earth.

Antler Netherlands’ sixth cohort has kicked off in Amsterdam. Here’s more about who they are and what you need to know about this group of exceptional people.

We're delighted to welcome David Fischer to the board of Antler.

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Avi Meir, founder and CEO of TravelPerk, shares his story of becoming a serial entrepreneur, and how his latest venture TravelPerk is changing the game in corporate travel.

Andrew Ofstad, co-founder of the world's largest no-code platform Airtable, shares how three friends from college built an $11 billion dollar no-code empire that more than 80% of the Fortune 100 uses day-to-day.

Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman, shares how he first came up with this idea, and how he has successfully competed with one of the world's most powerful companies, Google.

Mark Gainey, co-founder and chairman of Strava, shares the story of how he built the world's largest online athlete community.

It is always great to see more and more people willing to address mental health issues. Yet, as the conversation around mental health slowly expands, it also exposes the reality of crumbling support structures, lowered resilience levels, and the multiple failing points across our public and private healthcare systems. This is disheartening. The process of accepting that one needs help is difficult enough itself, the other steps needed in this journey should not add to the difficulty.

The following is a transcript of an interview between the co-founders of Faba and Antler. It has been slightly edited for clarity and length.

Teo Ortega is a contrarian builder who is not afraid of deviating from what is considered common knowledge. He likes to take things apart and understand how they work and put them back together in a new way as a way to understand their fundamentals — a form of reverse engineering if you will.

Global early-stage VC Antler kicked off Q2 2022 in Berlin with their Portfolio Reveal Day on April 7th. As part of the second Berlin cohort, 8 teams took to the stage to showcase their innovation. The founders behind these startups work on addressing big challenges across Medtech🏥, Mental Health/Psychedelics🍄, HR Tech👩‍💼, Cleantech 🌊, Clean Energy⚡, Cybersecurity🔐 and in the Creator Economy🖼.

This article is part of an Antler Berlin content series called ‘Call for Founders’. In this series, we will outline several exciting spaces in the startup and VC ecosystem that we see as opportunities ripe for venture creation. For this article we focus on marketplaces. These opportunities may emerge from an industry need, a trend, or indeed a prediction that we have had. If you like this series and you, or someone you know, is ready to build their own startup, apply to Antler.

An interview with Austin Chaird, Chief product and technology officer at Alpha Impact

Theory of Next is a series by Antler India that decodes and contextualizes the spaces and ideas of the future. Using first-principles approach, it provides a window into the process by which a venture capital firm arrives at a particular sectoral thesis.

The past two years in crypto have been absolutely astounding. From “DeFi summer” (now $250bn+ of total value locked) to “NFT craze” ($3.4bn monthly GMV on Opensea alone in August 2021) to Solana’s epic rise and various memecoin’s ultimate downfalls – the sheer pace of adoption and activity across the crypto ecosystem has been an incredible force.

Every venture fund in the world is currently deepening or developing a crypto thesis. Talent from traditional industries is pouring into crypto. And we now have an overarching, epochal narrative to define the movement: web3.

Amongst all the areas to focus on, I have chosen to write about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The reason for this is as follows:

• Incentive Innovation Rules All. Bitcoin provided a practical solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem by introducing an incentive innovation. In fact, much of crypto is about remixing existing technology with new incentives to create powerful new paradigms. DAOs are the natural frontier of incentive design in web3.
  
• Capital Power. The DeFi ecosystem, with $250bn total value locked (TVL), is the current “super-app” of web3. While only ~$10bn of DeFi TVL (~4%) is currently held in DAOs, this number will likely increase exponentially as more and more DeFi protocols progressively decentralize governance. More money, more power – DeFi Treasury DAOs have the potential for massively influencing web3 in 2022 and beyond as capital power grows.
  
• Web3 Promise. If the promise of web3 (versus web2) is to reduce centralized power in private, opaque corporate structures, then functional, community-led DAOs are a key prerequisite for the web3 promise to be fulfilled.

Businesses need financial help — badly. That’s the core of what Rajith Shaji and I were trying to address when we founded our expense management platform — Volopay — in 2019. What started with the intent to help Singaporean businesses manage their money better, has now turned into a service scaled across the APAC region.

Several years ago, one afternoon in Hanoi city center, I sat on the terrace in a cafe, watching people pass by with their various activities. A city bus passed, and I want to try it on but I couldn’t understand all the information on the bus. It was written in the Vietnamese alphabet. I finished my coffee quickly and ordered a taxi through a costly ride-hailing app as I had no other choice because I didn’t want to gamble by renting a motorbike there.

Theory of Next is a series by Antler India that decodes and contextualizes the spaces and ideas of the future. Using first-principles approach, it provides a window into the process by which a venture capital firm arrives at a particular sectoral thesis.

Global early-stage VC Antler has kicked off 2022 by welcoming 90 Australian founders into its latest cohort to build the defining companies of tomorrow. With ambitions extending across SaaS, FinTech, AgTech, HealthTech and GreenTech, here’s what you need to know about this mix of aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs.

With their eyes set on solving some of the world’s biggest challenges by building new category-defining companies, these ambitious individuals are embarking on their founder journey with Antler Australia to secure Pre-Seed investment.

Tune in to our Web3 Insights Call to learn about the new internet: Web3!

Rent hasn’t changed for several decades. In 2019, 36% of the 122.8 million households in the United States were renting their homes which is more than at any point in the past 50 years. The median price of a home is up nearly 70% in the last decade while median income has grown less than 30% in the same period. Homeownership and building wealth are increasingly out of reach for Americans. When homeownership isn’t feasible, more people rent, and rent prices skyrocket as they have done for the past 20 years. The multifamily housing industry is known for being slow to adopt new technology. However, increasing competition and the COVID-19 pandemic paired with generational shifts in apartment ownership to a younger more tech-savvy group has created many opportunities for technology companies to enter the multi-family housing market.

First appeared in The Economic Times. Head here for the story.

The future of mobility is at a critical point of inflection. Every time oil prices spike or climate change is debated and discussed, Electric Vehicles (EVs) are inevitably mentioned as a part of the solution. Yet, despite several new Indian companies entering various parts of the EV value chain, significant capital infused in the space, and large-scale execution efforts, EVs are not mainstream yet. It is 2021 and it seems we have hit the inflection point for EVs to take off, finally.

Theory of Next is a series by Antler India that decodes and contextualises the spaces and ideas of the future. Using first-principles approach, it provides a window into the process by which a venture capital firm arrives at a particular sectoral thesis. In this episode, Nitin Sharma (Partner, Antler India) and Vineet Agarwal (Investment Manager, Antler India) brainstorm and lay out our thesis on the electric vehicles landscape in India.

A longread about the road to founding a company and finding the ultimate problem to work on, by Jeffrey Duyvesteijn, co-founder and CEO of For Youth.

A conversation with Gina Xydias Charmanta, MBA, entrepreneur, and former consultant.

We spoke with Dr Tommy Mermelshtayn about Zip's growth to date and what it takes to transition from startup to scaleup

TradeBay is about to revolutionize the fruit trade industry by offering a Global fruit trading platform. Here is why the Stockholm portfolio company, led by CEO Filippa Jedeur-Palmgren, enables new market opportunities and why this Global multi-billion dollar industry is ripe for VC investment.

A conversation with Rafael Alain Rolli, bioengineer and entrepreneur.

A conversation with Annika (Kreil) Breu, founder of OH MY! Fantasy and former Bain Consultant.

At Antler, we believe exceptional people are the key to building defining companies. But what makes a person exceptional, and how do personal characteristics or experiences increase the chances of building a successful tech company? Through this Unicorn founder mapping series, we aim to identify patterns that led up to founding a Unicorn. This month, we explore Brazil, taking a look at the local Unicorn founders, which higher institutions they went to, how many years of work experience they had before launching their ventures, and more.

A conversation with Mikhail (Misha) Bragin, founder of WireTrustee.

Goldman Sachs veteran Sheila Patel joins the board of Antler. With three decades of experience in financial asset management, Patel has become a Global leader in the asset management industry.

As the world screeched to a standstill in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, few sectors were hit as hard as the travel industry. Globally, international arrivals dropped to 381 million in 2020, down from 1.461 billion in 2019 — a 74% decline. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the crisis put between 100 and 120 million direct tourism jobs at risk. As lockdowns fell into place worldwide, investors and entrepreneurs in the TravelTech sector switched to “survival mode”.

Yet in the midst of it all, Airalo persisted.

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Rajith has the natural gift of making people feel at ease. But we’re not going to lie; this conversation was different. To make it happen, we stretched over three continents: North America, Europe, and Asia. While it was late at night in Vancouver, it was early morning in Rotterdam and noon in Singapore. However, Rajith injected the conversation with good vibes from the first second, making us feel awake and inspired. It was the perfect way to start and end our day!

What's the secret to building and scaling a successful tech company? According to some of the top product-building experts in Southeast Asia, it's all about building a strong product culture from Day One. Setting strong product foundations looks different for companies at different stages, from seed to Series C and beyond, and must evolve based on the unique cultural environment in which you are building. Find out how businesses leaders from tech companies like Gojek, Lazada and more built successful internal product cultures.

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At some point, most data scientists or developers have built something that they think has startup potential or dreamed of launching their own successful product. Yet, many developers end up sticking with their jobs.

So, what makes someone take the leap and chase the startup dream? We asked three developers-turned-founders what prompted them to leave their jobs and start a company. From lacking a sense of purpose to feeling uninspired, stifled, or unappreciated, learn what motivated these successful founders to leave their full-time jobs to start a business.

At Antler, we believe exceptional people are the key to building defining companies. But what makes a person exceptional, and how do personal characteristics or experiences increase the chances of building a successful tech company? Last month, we took a systematic look at the most exceptional founders of the 21st century in the DACH region to identify patterns that led up to founding a Unicorn. This month, we are doing the same across the African continent. Our findings reveal who Africa’s Unicorn, Soonicorn, and growth-stage startup founders are, which higher institutions they went to, how many years of work experience they had before launching their ventures, and more. Additionally, we have taken a closer look at the future state of the local ecosystem and put together data-driven predictions to provide more insight and understanding into the African startup ecosystem and the opportunities that lie ahead.