October 2021

Antler is a global early-stage venture capital firm that invests in the defining technology companies of tomorrow.

Founded in Singapore in 2017, Antler is on a mission to fundamentally improve the world by enabling and investing in the world's most exceptional people, by supporting the teams with deep business model validation and providing a global platform for scaling. The firm has offices across 15 countries and 5 continents, covering most major entrepreneurial hubs, including London, Berlin, Stockholm, New York, Singapore and Sydney.

One of the world’s fastest growing VC firms; to date, Antler has invested in over 350 companies globally across 30 different industries. Of these companies, 40% have at least one female co-founder, and the founders represent 70 nationalities.

As India’s seed and early stage ecosystem matures, it’s time for an institutional platform at the pre-seed stage to help founders build global-ready unicorns.

Antler India will fill two critical gaps in the expanding Indian startup ecosystem.

👉🏽 Firstly, by being the only institutional fund focused on the pre-seed stage in India, it will provide founders with a combination of senior leadership, institutional resources and follow-on funding.

👉🏽 Secondly, it will particularly serve founders ‘building in India, for the world’, which we believe will be one of the biggest trends to watch. Antler’s platform-approach along with its vast global network (spread across 15 countries) ****of talent, advisors, founders and investors will help startups build for global markets from Day 1.

👉🏽 Additionally, each member of the Antler India team is an ex-founder and creator, bringing a truly ‘founder-first’ ethos in everything we do.

Earlier this year, Antler announced a full-fledged launch in India, with the goal of deploying $100M in India in the next 3 years.

Antler India started its journey with unique cohort-based programs, which received a tremendous response, with inbound applications from nearly 5000 startups representing 8000 founders in the last 8 months. The program format enables founders in their ‘0 to 1’ journey, with a focus on cohort-based learning, bespoke support over the first year of the founder journey, all alongside a pre-seed investment.

We have invested in 13 startups (less than 0.3% of the nearly 5000 startups who applied). Through this funnel, which is amongst the largest and the most selective in the country, we feel fortunate to get a first glimpse of the new ideas and startups that the next generation of Indian founders are aspiring to build.

Antler India has recently announced its first set of investments in Bookee, Codedamn, Flow Club, Humit and PeakPerformer. We will be announcing our next 8 portfolio startups soon. Overall, we have invested across sectors in FinTech, SaaS, EdTech, Ecommerce, D2C, Mobility, HRTech, Social and Community, as of date.

We are a startup’s first institutional backers. We currently do pre-seed investments in the range of $200k for earliest stage founders, even at a concept or idea stage. Moreover, we are a rare global institutional fund dedicated to this stage in India, and we can support founders through multiple stages in the first 4-5 years of the journey with significant reserve capital for future rounds. In addition, we can also co-lead or participate in select later stage investments, with bigger cheque sizes.

While Antler India is sector agnostic, we are quite passionate about several new themes that often cut across conventional sectors or spaces. These include decentralization, Web3 and the metaverse, new brands, climate change, or wellness.

Antler, the world's fastest growing company builder is led in India by Rajiv Srivatsa, one of India's most respected start-up founders and Nitin Sharma, one of India's most active early stage investors. Rajiv and Nitin are Partners at Antler India, and Co-founders for the Antler India Fund.

Rajiv co-founded Urban Ladder, one of India's most beloved omni-channel brands that changed the way Indians shop for furniture online. Over ~8 years, Urban Ladder served more than 1 million customers, grew to 1,000+ employees, and raised over $100Mn in venture capital from top global VCs. Prior to Urban Ladder, Rajiv built cutting-edge products catering to international markets at Yahoo!