People rarely fit into neat categories, but broadly speaking it is those with the skills relevant to early stage business building combined with Founder DNA:

Backgrounds:

• Returning founders: Tried and tested founders who have valuable experience through successes and/or failures and are ready to build their next venture.
• Business leaders: Commercial pros with strengths in go-to-market, business model building, and securing customers and capital.
• Technology and product leaders: Builders with their hands on in the code base, architecting scalable systems, or setting and executing on the product vision and leading teams.
• SMEs or functional experts: Those with a specialised skill set that unlocks the idea behind a business usually from professional or academic experience. These individuals have identified an unmet customer need in their field, under utilised technology, or hold Intellectual Property that can be commercialised.
• 0 to 1: Seasoned in startups and highly knowledgeable in early-stage through to hypergrowth, these individuals have held defining roles in the growth journey of companies.
• Visionaries: Those that have exceptional, unique, and non-conventional backgrounds and see that world a different way, complemented with strong grit and hustle to be successful.

Founder DNA:

• Creative problem solving: Those who can intelligently and creatively navigate a pathway to an outcome.
• Inner drive: Self-starters that can motivate themselves and others to join and unite in fulfilling a mission. Often seen through a track record of reaching achievements earlier than expected or having set high, long term, goals and reached them.
• Grit: Those with an energy source that never runs low, able to find a window when the door closes. Seen via a willingness and ability to keep going when faced with obstacles.

Antler is business model and industry agnostic. This can be seen via the breadth of our portfolio.

Globally, Antler has invested in over 1,000+ companies to date across many industries. In Australia, we have an active portfolio size of >100 companies that is well balanced across different sectors. We have:

• Enterprise SaaS startups operating in construction site management, cyber security, Talent management, and computer vision.
• Digital platforms in verticals such as health, learning, pet services.
• Services and D2C in waste management, consumer loyalty, fashion and personalised books.
• Fintech and Insurtech startups within SME lending and new insurance products covering a range of industries such as SaaS, FinTech, GreenTech, ConsumerTech.
• Deeptech startups from startups built and led by AI/ ML technologies, through to biotechnology, data analytics, space and aviation and more.

Antler has a strong bias toward co-founding teams, with the average consisting of 2.3 founders.

We do have examples of solo founders in our portfolio but they are few.

Antler believes in co-founders because:

• As a Day Zero investor, a solo founder represents a significant key person risk to the company.
• We back complementary, non-overlapping teams. This means two or three founders who can own functions of the business fitting to their areas of expertise.
  • For example tech + domain. This gives the founding team the breadth to execute at pace and clear ownership and decision making ability.
  • It also negates the need to outsource costly areas of the business to increase run-rate.
    • Founder health is vital and operating as a co-founder team enables you to spread not just the operational but also emotional load of launching and scaling a company.

At Antler, we accept founders with and without ideas. We know that in early stage business building a lot can change, ideas pivot and business models are adapted, which is why we primarily back the team’s ability to execute.

This means you can join Antler with your skill set to bring to another’s idea. If you are wanting to work on a formed idea, we will test your founder-problem fit, i.e. what gives you the unfair advantage to win in your chosen area?

Equally, teams with formed ideas and initial validation can join. In this case, our fixed terms are the same so if you have already taken on capital this should be a consideration.

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Joining Antler gives you access to a vetted talent pool of potential co-founders. However, if you do not find a co-founder in your residency, you are not restricted to the four walls of Antler and we encourage you to do your own external search. In this case, we will ask you to introduce them to us and we will conduct an interview. If that goes well, we will send them a Letter of Offer to join you in the current residency.

Another option is that, via an invitation by us, you can join the next Antler residency as a returning founder. We have many examples where we have backed a team who have initially started in separate residencies.

Absolutely. We encourage you to have preliminary conversations with other investors including but not limited to angel investors, friends and family as well as other institutional investors. That said, you should not be soliciting term sheets whilst you are in Residency. This process of raising a priced equity round or SAFE should happen after you complete the Residency.

The true value of building with Antler comes post-investment, as that unlocks our portfolio support consisting of:

• Ability to follow-on from the local fund
  • Antler Australia has deployed additional capital into >80% of our portfolio
  • We aim to follow-on programmatically up to Series A stage
  • We have invested over A$1M into multiple companies over multiple rounds
• A global fund to back companies through their later rounds
  • Antler Elevate has US$280M fund designed to back Antler businesses from Series A-C with average cheque sizes of $3-10M
• Warm introduction to external capital from angels and other institutional investors
• Ongoing business coaching and advisory from our global network
• International scaling support driven through Antler’s on the ground presence in 23 regions
• Introductions to partners, funding sources, key hires
• Antler’s ability to spot synergies and intel from over 700 global transactions to inform coaching
• Perks and partnerships that by the sum of parts now exceed $3M in value
• The Talent Network, Antler’s proprietary platform to connect Antler portfolio companies to vetted job seekers
• Community support via Slack and in-person initiatives