AI Disrupt: Igniting the Next Wave of AI Innovation

We are living two simultaneous realities: the uncertainty of the current downturn and the unstoppable wave of innovation disrupting every industry. Against this backdrop, Antler's Kevin Brennan shares perspectives on assessing your position in venture capital for the rest of 2022 and into 2023. Might 2023 be the best vintage for the coming decade?

We are thrilled to lead the pre-seed round of Motif, a team formed at Antler India Residency as they transform the way SaaS is sold.

Antler’s seventh Amsterdam residency has officially kicked off! Are you ready to meet them? Here is more about who we invited to join the residency and what you need to know about this group of exceptional people.

Antler was founded on the belief that people innovating is the key to building a better future. To honor them, we are launching a new content series—”It All Starts with People”—spotlighting the exceptional founders we have the privilege of partnering with around the world. Each story is a window into their passions, motivations, and vision—the reasons they are building and the positive dent they are aiming to make on the world.

In our first spotlight, we sat down with Emilia Theye, the co-founder of clare&me—a mental health app that uses language-based AI to develop an innovative approach to virtual self-help.

Today we are sharing our new brand that reflects that commitment and the reason Antler exists: to stand behind our founders from day zero and to keep backing them on their paths to greatness.

After receiving initial investment from Antler, our portfolio companies work with the Antler US team in a rigorous sprint to build and prepare for their next round of fundraising. We’re so excited to see what these tremendous founders accomplish next!

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.

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A country of over 1.4 billion people and something as crucial as the medical emergency response system still remains unsolved. The numbers quantify the magnitude and gravity of this problem - over 50% of the ambulances do not arrive even after 60 minutes, 90% of ambulances do not have the basic equipment and 97% have no trained personnel. But here is the most staggering number of them all - over 50% of all deaths in India are preventable. While ambulances are a part of the problem, they are not the solution. The missing piece in creating a robust medical emergency response system is a solid digital infrastructure layer.

Founders are the life force of the startup ecosystem. They give their all, betting on their seemingly “crazy” convictions and executing on abstract ideas that can potentially make our lives and work easier, faster, healthier, and better optimized.

But sometimes they do this to the detriment of their health. Being a founder means being beholden to customers, employees, and investors while balancing personal life. Often founders trade their stable, well-paying jobs to prioritize the restless inquisitivity of their mind. In the quest to answer the question “what if?”, they sometimes sacrifice their mental and physical health, only realizing the effects on their state of mind once they have impacted their ability to function as a leader. We have also seen how the mental pressure on founders can cause distress to those who depend on them for their livelihood and direction.

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.

A fitting pairing of Hitesh Bhuraria and Nishant Singh, one that was formed at the first-ever cohort of Antler India Residency, is set to build the future of how companies approach their decarbonization goals.

Antler founders scale faster and more efficiently, backed by our truly global community that includes industry-leading companies. We are thrilled to collaborate with IBM to give our fintech founders access to world-class technology experts and cloud platforms.

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Why is a cloud strategy so critical for fintechs and why can it spell success or failure for a startup? We sat down with Prakash Pattni, Managing Director—Digital Transformation, IBM Cloud for Financial Services, to learn more.

Investors and startups are increasingly making money and driving positive change at the same time, unwilling to make a trade-off. How are they achieving both? While IPO valuations and revenue multiples for VC-backed companies in Europe dropped significantly this year, investment in climate tech is growing faster than any other sector in the region. Energy prices and policy (e.g., the Inflation Reduction Act in the US) alongside changing consumer behaviors have increased pressure for innovators to accelerate the energy transition.

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To learn more about how investors and entrepreneurs are striking a balance between impact and profit in climate tech, Antler Amsterdam recently hosted a panel discussion with four experts—Hampus Jakobsson, General Partner at Pale Blue Dot; Lukky Ahmed, CEO of Climate X; Melina Sanchez, Principal & VP Impact at AENU, and David Oudsandji, CEO and founder of Voltfang.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Singapore
June 20, 2022

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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.

A global leader in the one of the most complex investment strategies

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.

Amsterdam Dance Event and Antler announced that the five-day long electronic music conference and festival and the early-stage venture capital investor have teamed up for the 2022 ADE & Antler Startup Competition.

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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🖼.

Antler Netherlands’ fifth 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.

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

In the past years, podcast listening has become more popular than ever, but with so many out there it can be difficult to know what will be the best podcast for you as an entrepreneur and startup founder.

We have created a list of over 30 podcasts to inspire your listening habits curated by our network - from founders building their business with Antler to our team and advisors. No matter whether you are a first time founder or have done it all before, this list is guaranteed to offer something new.

Looking for even more practical resources for founders? Recently, we also shared our book recommendations for entrepreneurs selected by the Antler founders, advisors, and our team. Check them out!

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.

Football scouts search all corners of the world to find exceptionally talented individuals. They look for skill, vision, mental strength, and character, which you could argue are similar to what VCs look for in entrepreneurs.

Believing in our unlimited potential is one of the most powerful mindsets that one can possess to own our impact and ultimately win in life. It all begins with reframing limits and scarcity as opportunities for growth. At Antler, we invest in people by enlarging their capacity to not just be competent founders but also rise up as great leaders. In honour of International Women’s Day, we asked female founders at Antler and Antler team members how they overcame challenges to live out their true potential.

We hope you’ll find these stories as inspiring as we do!

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.