The best way to launch your startup
Antler is an on ramp to venture capital and helps you launch your startup from scratch. We surround you with everything you need to build at lightning speed. Join our upcoming AMA to learn more (register here)!
Antler is an on ramp to venture capital and helps you launch your startup from scratch. We surround you with everything you need to build at lightning speed. Join our upcoming AMA to learn more (register here)!
We look for founders with a proven track record of execution (across a range of academic and professional backgrounds), who are fiercely ambitious, who possess an intense bias towards execution, and who are innately driven to change the world. You must be able to attend our eight-week Residency in-person in either Austin or New York City. We are entirely focused on the 0 to 1: the earliest stages of team and business building. You can come to us with just an idea - if you're truly ready to sprint forward and build, we'll work with you from day zero.
If you're looking to find a co-founder, validate your business idea, and launch a startup, the Antler Residency is for you.
Are you an individual ready to start something new, and looking for the right co-founder?
Antler brings together an exclusive group of ambitious people to explore ideas together. Meet, learn, and co-create with exceptional builders. Join us to turn your vision into reality. Individuals and teams will join the same residency kicking off in October 2024.
Do you already have a team and are ready to start building. Joining Antler gives you the opportunity to build alongside like-minded, ambitious founders.
Build long-lasting relationships, gain access to coaching, network resources, investor introductions, and valuable support—regardless of your idea’s stage. Individuals and teams will join the same residency kicking off in October 2024.
The Antler program in the US begins with an in-person, pre-investment founder Residency that runs for eight weeks. Founders have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee at week eight. Those who receive funding from our Investment Committee move into weekly coaching with our Antler team with a focus on rapid growth and rigorous fundraising preparation.
Join the Antler Residency to find your cofounder, validate your ideas, and launch your business. For each batch we hand select 80 founders in each of our three locations from more than 8,000 applications. That means you will be surrounded by more than 250 of the best and brightest founders from all over the country. All accepted founders may apply for a $2.5k living expense grant. The first seven weeks of the Residency is in-person and designed to give you an effective and intimate community to find your co-founder. Thoughtful social events, team hackathons, a batch wide directory, and a co-founder toolkit all support you in finding your perfect co-founder.
After building with us in Residency, you may have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee for pre-seed funding to launch your startup at week eight. One pitch, one committee: it's a simple, straightforward process. If you receive funding, we will write you a check for $200,000 via SAFE for 8% of your new company. If you don't receive funding, we will sit down and tell you exactly why—100% transparency.
Once you receive investment from Antler, you will then move into Phase 2: the Antler portfolio experience. Here you work to find product-market fit, build your team, and successfully raise your seed round. Funded teams will meet online on a weekly basis to track progress on team, product, customer traction, and investor relations. They will also meet regularly with the Antler team for hands on support and coaching leading up to the Investor Showcase.
When founders are ready to raise their next rounds of funding, they are eligible to opt into Antler's Investor Showcase. This is how we share our investments with outside investors. We take a hand selected, curated approach to helping you meet investors — no standing on stage, no demo day. We make relevant introductions based on stage, sector and business models to more than 500 investors that we work closely with to help you build a strong and relevant funnel to raise your seed round.
Here are some of the teams we've backed.
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Don't just take it from us. Hear from phenomenal people who joined Antler in the US to launch their company.
Malcolm-Wiley Floyd
Stairs Financial
Antler’s collection of founders, operators and investors is the strongest platform for an early stage founder on the market.
Manuel Shoenfeld
PowerX
Building a startup with Antler allows you the room to develop, grow or even pivot your business idea, providing you with the guidance you need along the way.
Trisha Goyal
Break Sports
Antler truly understands what it means to be a founder and are truly involved as partners with portfolio companies at the earliest stage.
Jacob Shoihet
Marco Capital
Antler really did accelerate Marco's trajectory: we created a broad network of VC connections and raised a material amount of additional institutional cash. This allows us to make the impact that we want to achieve: we’re building the premier tech-enabled trade finance platform in Latin America. Antler has been an integral partner in powering us forward.
Jeff is a sales leader and investor. Over a nine year run at LinkedIn, Jeff held a series of roles launching new business units and leading sales teams to best-in-company performances as the business grew to 770 million members and $10B in revenue. Separately, Jeff launched his own company, Earhoox, scaling it across the globe. He is also an active angel investor focused on health, wealth, and happiness. Before coming to Antler, he was a General Partner at Forum Ventures, focused on early stage B2B SaaS.
Tyler Norwood is Managing Partner for Antler in the United States, where he oversees the firm’s US growth and geographic expansion. Tyler joined Antler in 2017 as its fifth full-time employee and has been instrumental in launching and scaling the firm. Prior to joining Antler, Tyler was the Global Head of Business Development for Global Fashion Group (GFG), where he was in charge of launching a marketplace business model for GFG’s companies across 21 different countries; he also assisted with the company’s IPO in Frankfurt in 2017. Before GFG, Tyler was the Interim Head of Marketplace at Jabong, which he helped sell for $70 million in 2016, and Head of Marketplace Vietnam at Zalora, the largest fashion e-commerce company in Asia. Along the way, Tyler has also completed the Vietnam Marathon, Singapore Marathon, and Boulder Iron Man. Tyler is passionate about providing a better on ramp to Venture Capital for founders who want to change the world and hands on support for founders in the first 6 months of launching a new startup.
Ryan Sommerville is a General Partner at Antler US. As the first hire for Antler's US expansion four years ago, he played a pivotal role in establishing the firm's presence in New York and Austin. As Head of Portfolio, Ryan spearheaded Antler US’s portfolio management, driving the success of the firm's investments and supporting the growth of portfolio companies. Prior to Antler, Ryan built and scaled ventures in the financial services, apparel, and technology sectors and served as the Director of Financial Programs at Start Small, Think Big.
Prerna Sharma is a General Partner at Antler US and head of the firm’s Austin office. Prerna joined Antler in 2018 in Singapore and was among the first 5 employees of the firm. Before moving to Austin, Prerna was instrumental in expanding Antler’s presence globally along with creating our core methodology on founder origination. Before Antler, Prerna was employee #3 at Uber Asia, where she helped scale Uber across all cities in Asia. After Uber, Prerna successfully laid the entire People & Culture framework at Flow Traders Asia, a leading Dutch proprietary trading firm, specializing in ETFs. Prerna graduated as a Computer Engineer and spent her early career in India building highly scalable products for massive companies like AMEX and GE Healthcare.
Lisa joins Antler with over 16 years of experience in Venture Capital. Before Antler, Lisa was the CFO of Tribe Capital. Prior to Tribe, Lisa served as VP of Finance for Khosla Ventures and as the part-time CFO for several smaller firms including Asset Management Ventures & Prospect Ventures. She started her career at Morgenthaler, based in Cleveland, Ohio.
Charlie Hayley Bell leads Capital and Investor Relations for Antler US. Charlie has 20 years of alternative investment experience in the US, and Latin America across both public and private markets advising investors and raising capital for hedge funds, real estate, PE, and venture capital. Charlie is an investor in early and growth stage technology and CPG companies. He previously was with HSBC, Archstone Partners, and Old City Securities. He holds a MA from Edinburgh University.
Roslyn is a strategy and business development specialist with a background in hypergrowth sales, financial markets, and international policy. Prior to Antler, she helped launch the enterprise segment at WeWork and partnered with financial services accounts to develop custom innovation solutions. Previously, she held positions in structured derivatives at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and U.S.-China trade policy at the Executive Office of the President. Roslyn holds a BA from Cornell University and an MBA with an emphasis in strategy and product management from NYU Stern.
Caroline works with founders in Antler's Austin office and leads Antler's US marketing and growth functions. Prior to joining Antler, Caroline worked at NationSwell as an associate producer and in finance at Visa. Caroline graduated Cum Laude from the University of San Diego, where she obtained her BBA in Finance and Business Economics.
Rio is a Senior Principal at Antler US. Prior to Antler, Rio was focused on growth strategy and innovation at frog where he was a Senior Strategist, shaping ideas into commercially viable products and services. Previously, Rio had experience in both growth equity and early-stage VC.
Cody is a Principal on the investing team at Antler. He studied Computer Science at Stanford University before joining Goldman Sachs as a quantitative trader. He has since run product at an early stage FinTech startup, taught >1000 students how to code through his organization Code Sleep Repeat, and most was recently at General Catalyst as the Head of Data Science. He enjoys surfing in California and complaining about the weather in New York.
Cash is a principal on the investment team at Antler. Previously, he was a tech-focused investor at Sweater, the first early stage VC fund available to the public. Cash draws on both a technical and investment background, with time spent at Lucid Software (data engineer) and an early stage impact fund (impact investment associate). Cash holds a BS in Information Systems from Brigham Young University.
Kelly is a Principal on the investing team at Antler. Prior to Antler, she worked across the startup ecosystem at the intersection of technology, climate, and capital. She was a product manager at an edtech nonprofit, a system design engineer and operations manager at agtech startups Plenty and Sensei Ag, Chief of Staff at an energy and climate business, and an intern at three venture capital firms while completing her MBA. In her free time, she can be found exploring a new city, listening to Planet Money or My Climate Journey, climbing, surfing, or searching for a new local coffee spot. Kelly holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Jake is a professional matchmaker and entrepreneurship enthusiast. After graduating from UT Austin, Jake joined Capital Factory's Investor Relations team, eventually growing to the role of Director of Platform managing the fund’s value add services for portfolio founders. After Capital Factory, he joined Foundation Capital, a 30 year old bay area Pre-Seed fund where he built out their Portfolio support function and managed the firm's relationships with F500 VP and CLevel executives. At Antler, Jake identifies high potential future founders and runs them through Antler's investment process. Outside of work, Jake is an avid fan of the NBA and enjoys grilling, walking his two dogs Rainey and Tedder, and trying new cuisines.
Sam is a management professional with over 7 years progressive experience in customer experience, operations, team building and project management for the hospitality industry. She joins us from WeWork where she was a Community Lead. Prior to WeWork, Sam worked for the Four Seasons Hotels as a Guest Experience & Operations Manager.
Lauren is our Senior Program Manager on the U.S. platform & founder experience team. She joins Antler from Alloy Labs, a consortium of 80+ mid-sized and community banks across the U.S. where she led multiple projects leading to industry publications, bank/fintech partnerships, and lobbying & standardization efforts alongside the FDIC, OCC and FRB. Previously she worked at Nymbus, a banking core start-up company, where she worked alongside the sales & marketing teams to analyze niche data to drive B2B sales. In her free time she enjoys skiing, teaching (and taking) pilates classes, reading, and walking her dog MJ (named after her favorite CO ski mountain, Mary Jane).
Kaila creates life-changing experiences for our founders. She leads founder residency and community events in NYC. She formerly led community experience at The Org for founders and CHROs. Prior to that, she worked as a B2B software sales trainer at Sprinklr, Procore and CreatorIQ and used to volunteer with Seoul Startups in Korea as a community host and speaker. She also coaches executives and founders in public speaking and storytelling.
Besart is a Principal on Antler’s team in NYC. Before Antler, he founded his own venture-backed startup, Chestr, the #1 Chrome shopping wishlist. Before Chestr, he worked at AnchorFree, the company behind the world's most popular VPNs: Hotspot Shield and VPN Super. During college, Beast interned in VC at Citi Ventures and a16z. He’s incredibly excited to support NYC founders full-time with Antler.
Throughout our residencies, successful entrepreneurs have shared their insights and experiences with our founders, offering valuable mentorship !
Lessons learned from the world's best founders and VCs
Michelle You is co-founder and CEO of Supercritical, one of the world's largest carbon removal marketplaces. But Supercritcal isn't the first startup Michelle has built and scaled. Before Supercritical, Michelle was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Songkick, a company that helped fans discover concerts from their favorite artists. Songkick was backed by investors like YC, Index, Sequoia, Access and ultimately exited to Warner Music.
Michelle shares how her experience at Songkick has influenced her approach to building Supercritical. We discuss the importance of user interviews, ascertaining key insights from customers, and how to structure an analytical decision making process. These are valuable, hard-earned lessons from a serial founder that you don't want to miss.
Swish Goswami is the co-founder and CEO of Surf, a startup that helps consumers monetize their digital footprints through the world’s first extension that passively rewards people for everyday browsing. Surf has raised over $4M to date and also provides first and zero party data to enterprises like Netflix, L’Oreal, United Talent Agency, and Electronic Arts.
In this episode of Early Days, Swish talks about his decision to drop out of the University of Toronto to work in startups, how he honed in on Surf’s ultimate value prop for brands and customers, and his thoughts on the future of consumer data privacy. Tyler grills Swish on how he recruited AAA+ talent to his team at such a young age and how he validated product-market fit with Surf's early (paying) customers.
Cameo is the world's largest celebrity marketplace. With Cameo, you can access thousands of celebrities and request a personalized video message for any occasion from your favorite stars.
Arthur Leopold recognized the potential of selfies becoming the new autographs. He quickly joined Cameo as the first employee (COO) and invested in the startup's friends and family round. Arthur spent over 5.5 years with Cameo, serving as President through January 2023. While Arthur recently stepped down as President to start his own company, he remains a Senior Advisor and an ardent supporter of the team.
We recorded this podcast while Arthur was Cameo's acting President. In this episode of Early Days, Arthur talks about the first Cameo that started it all, combatting the chicken-egg problem in marketplaces, finding near instantaneous product-market fit with fans, and Cameo's distinctive celebrity acquisition strategy.
Have you ever had an idea for a really awesome product, but you get stuck because you don't know how to write code? Well, today's guest, Emmanuel Straschnov, is solving that problem as the founder and CEO of Bubble.io. Emmanuel and his co-founder, Josh, wanted to put the ability to write software at the fingertips of the entire world. In 2012, they started Bubble, and set out to build a no-code platform that equips anyone to write beautiful software. Listen to this episode of Early Days to learn how Emmanuel and Josh bootstrapped for seven years before taking external capital, building Bubble into a unicorn in the process.
In Episode 10 of the Early Days, Scott tells the story of his 16-year journey building charity:water with the mission to give people access to clean water.
Did you know that nearly 45 million Americans don't have a credit score, and most are immigrant families that struggle with lack of access to basic financial services because of this? In Episode 9 of the Early Days, Samir Goel shares how watching his parents struggle with lack of access to basic financial services inspired him to build Esusu.
Fredrik Thomassen is the founder and CEO of Superside, a fully distributed and remote design operations platform. Fredrik explains how he and his co-founder got Superside off the ground by manually hacking together an MVP without any tech or teammates who knew how to code. We also hear Fredrik's insights on prioritizing his scope of product offerings, fundraising, and running a truly global company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can apply to our Residency if you hold any type of valid US work visa.
We are focused on providing founders better access to capital at the very beginning of their journey, so we back founders at the ideation stage. We'll invest as early as a clearly defined product statement and roadmap to your MVP, we'll even help you incorporate your new venture if necessary. We always aim to be the first institutional check into our portfolio companies.
We are industry agnostic and invest across all technology sectors.
The next Antler US Residency will launch in October 2024 in-person Austin, TX and New York City. We highly encourage you to invite stellar fellow founders in your network to apply to Antler!
The Antler residency is a full-time commitment. This means that you are 100% dedicating your time to building your company. That said, it is not “mandatory” to be in the office from 9-5PM daily. The intention is to foster an engaged and supportive community of founders building together in person. As long as you show up for cohort activities and receive value from the community, you can spend your time in any way you see most fit to build your company. Most founders come in 4-5 days a week.
Yes - all accepted founders who are relocating for the residency may apply for a $2.5k living expense grant. If you are joining us from out of town, check out Relocation Resources.
Yes, co-founders are welcome, though we only require 1 founder to be dedicated full-time in the residency. While we do not guarantee co-founder matching during the residency, you are encouraged to meet and potentially team up with other residents, bring in folks from your network to work in the office, or canvas the Antler network for potential co-founder fits. This cohort, we will have around 80 founders joining us per location.
Not every founder or team will receive the opportunity to present to the investment committee (IC) during Pitch Week. This happens for a variety of reasons, including: dropping out for personal reasons or time commitment issues, pivoting your idea and requiring more time to validate, not demonstrating sufficient traction to put your best foot forward yet, deciding to join another founder or team, or deciding that your business is not venture scalable, amongst other reasons. If it is the case that you do not present to the Antler IC at this point in time, we will work with you on an individual basis to explore other options, such as joining our Talent Network, setting goals and a timeline for a delayed IC pitch, etc.
We do not have a minimum or maximum number of investments per cohort or location, though it is unlikely that we invest in 100% or 0% of founders in the residency. Historically, we have invested in 20-45% of founders in each residency. We generally make our decisions based on founder strength in domain expertise, deep understanding of the problem statement and your customer, first principled thinking and vision, execution ability, and progress made over the period of time.
We would never force anyone to take our money 🙂 Technically, the Memorandum of Understanding (part of your DocuSign package) is an expectation-setting legal document. We expect teams to honor the spirit of the agreement as we do. The intent is that over the eight weeks, we will earn our equity, and you will see the value of having the Antler team on your cap table and as an active advisor for continued future support as an extension of your founding team.
If you successfully pitch to the investment committee, you will become part of the Antler portfolio and kick off Phase II. You will be assigned a deal lead to work closely with going forward, and go through a transition week where we will support you on incorporation, documentation, admin, and other items in order to receive the funding, clarify goals and milestones, and set you up on the path to scale and raise your seed.
If you are unsuccessful in pitching to the investment committee, you will still remain a valuable part of the Antler community for life. You will retain access to office space for an additional week, remain in our Slack community and other platforms, and can meet with our team to discuss next steps for your startup. Previous residents have taken on feedback and returned to pitch successfully, joined Antler portfolio companies or the talent network, or started new companies and returned to Antler. The door is always open 🔑
Get in touch with our team!
Register for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or join us for a weekly live AMA to meet the Antler team.
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