Private Equity International names Ros Bazany as Woman of Influence 2024
Why Venture Capital Journal picked Ros as one of the most impactful women in private markets.
Investing in Finverv
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.
India
Early Days—Episode 6: Glovo with Sacha Michaud
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.
US
Theory of Next by Antler India | Episode 04—The Next Era for Space Tech
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.
India
The 2022 Canada Unicorn Founder Roadmap: The People behind Canada's Flourishing Unicorn-Land
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.
Canada
Early Days—Episode 5: Magical with Harpaul Sambhi
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.
US
Will the golden age of innovation prevail?
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.
Global
Investing in Adaptive
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.
India
The 2022 DACH Unicorn Founder Roadmap: An Unprecedented Time in Unicorn-Land
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.
Germany
Real lessons from real founders: Antler’s Early Days podcast
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.
US
A fresh take on early-stage VC: Harvard Business School publishes a case study on Antler
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.
Global
Antler Launches 6th Cohort in Amsterdam
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.
Netherlands
Former Chief Revenue Officer of Facebook David Fischer joins the Antler board
We're delighted to welcome David Fischer to the board of Antler.
Global
Early Days—Episode 4: TravelPerk with Avi Meir
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.
US
Early Days—Episode 3: Airtable with Andrew Ofstad
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.
US
Early Days—Episode 2: Superhuman with Rahul Vohra
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.
US
Early Days—Episode 1: Strava with Mark Gainey
Mark Gainey, co-founder and chairman of Strava, shares the story of how he built the world's largest online athlete community.
US
Mental Healthcare is in need of disruption. Can tech startups keep India sane?
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.
India
How I met my co-founder and launched a plant-based meal delivery company
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.
Singapore
The founding bug — why I joined Antler
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.
Germany
Meet the 8 new startups backed by Antler in its second Berlin cohort
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🖼.
Germany
Marketplaces are a prime opportunity for early-stage startups - here’s why
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.
Germany
The Web3 Founder Journey: The Power of Communities
An interview with Austin Chaird, Chief product and technology officer at Alpha Impact
Singapore
Theory of Next by Antler India | Episode 03—Mental Wellness Tech
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.
India
DAOs and Web3 Governance: The Promise, Implications and Challenges Ahead
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.
India
Volopay: The full expense management stack that every business needs.
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.
Singapore
Jaramba: The app that’s pulling all the stops for a safer & more reliable daily commute in emerging markets.
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.
Indonesia
Theory of Next by Antler India | Episode 02—Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
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.
India
Antler Australia rings in the New Year welcoming 90 founders to build early-stage tech companies
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.
Australia
Web3 Insights Call hosted by Antler
Tune in to our Web3 Insights Call to learn about the new internet: Web3!
India
Watson Living makes rent rewarding
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.
US
Electric Vehicles: A roadmap to mass adoption in India
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.
India
Theory of Next by Antler India | Episode 01—Electric Vehicles
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.
India
A founder’s story — how “longevity” is the ultimate problem to solve
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.
Singapore
The adrenaline of building something new & challenging — Why I joined Antler
A conversation with Gina Xydias Charmanta, MBA, entrepreneur, and former consultant.
Germany
Zip CSO shares what it takes to transition from startup to scaleup
We spoke with Dr Tommy Mermelshtayn about Zip's growth to date and what it takes to transition from startup to scaleup
Australia
My Antler journey—driving the psychedelics revolution
A conversation with Rafael Alain Rolli, bioengineer and entrepreneur.
Germany
From bootstrapping to building a truly scalable venture — Why I joined Antler
A conversation with Annika (Kreil) Breu, founder of OH MY! Fantasy and former Bain Consultant.
Germany
The Unicorn founder roadmap: The origins of Brazil’s Unicorn founders and emerging entrepreneurial stars
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.
Brazil
Revamping Virtual Private Networks — Why I joined Antler
A conversation with Mikhail (Misha) Bragin, founder of WireTrustee.
Germany
Antler recruits former Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Sheila Patel, to board
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.
Global
How this traveltech startup raised a $5.4M series A in the middle of a global pandemic
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.
Singapore
Rajith Shaji: The Persistent Founder
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!
Singapore
Technologists-turned-CTOs share why they quit their day job to start a company
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.
The Unicorn founder roadmap: Insights into Africa's startup founders and the ecosystem
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.
Kenya
Antler VC Cast Episode 22 — The Future of Food with Josh Tetrick
In Episode 22, we speak to Josh Tetrick, founder of Eat Just Inc., a San Francisco-based FoodTech startup that is radically reimagining the way we consume meat globally. Eat Just is best known for its mung bean-based egg substitute called "Just Egg" and its “lab-grown” cultured chicken. In December 2020, Singapore became the first country in the world to grant approval of the sale of cultured chicken. Eat Just was founded in 2011, and the company has raised over US$650 million and had last been valued at US$1.2 billion.
In this episode, Josh talks about how he came to focus on the problem with food, solving massive challenges in the food industry and building a new universe of tools to supply food in a more ethical way. He discusses the hurdles to widespread adoption of plant-based meats, talks about the mindset shift towards FoodTech innovation that will occur in the next decade, and shares advice for aspiring founders looking to solve real problems in our society.
Advice from founders for founders on how to maintain optimal mental health whilst building a startup
To better understand the complexities of mental health for founders, Antler teamed up with Female Founders, the leading European Eco-System for Entrepreneurial Women, to discuss mental exhaustion and how to prevent it as part of a fireside chat.
Global
Crypto startup Alpha Impact is poised for success amid a boom in investment and regulation within the industry, Globally
Alpha Impact is a social media network built to give a crypto trader with $25 the same tools as one with 25 BTC.
Global
12 founders share their top growth hacking tips for early-stage startups
From inventive ways to leverage your network, to forming strategic partnerships, and more.
Australia
The Unicorn founder roadmap: Two decades of insights into the DACH startup ecosystem
Have you ever wondered who the most successful entrepreneurs are? What career paths they pursued, what network they tapped into, and whether these stereotypical rules still apply today if you want to build the next billion-dollar business?
Taking a systematic look at the most exceptional founders of the 21st century in the DACH region, we have observed similar patterns that led up to founding a unicorn.
Germany
Founders Series: Zabrina Chew, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda
The founders series takes a deep dive into the journey of Antler portfolio company founders and sheds light on the space they are building in. This week, we spoke to Zabrina Chew, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda. Soda is a social discovery platform to help millennial professionals find and engage with relevant and trusted communities around them easily. Soda is building the future of discovery, co-creation, and collaboration, bringing its community together through streamlined content and small, intimate gatherings.
Singapore