MAKING PROGRESS
INEVITABLE
Antler is the investor backing the world’s most driven founders, from day zero to greatness.
Antler is the investor backing the world’s most driven founders, from day zero to greatness.
Founded on the belief that people innovating is the key to building a better future, Antler partners with exceptional founders across six continents to launch and scale startups that address meaningful opportunities and challenges.
Knowing that exceptional founders can come from anywhere with any background, we have offices in 27 cities across six continents, including Austin, New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Bangalore, Jakarta, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, and Sydney.
Our global community of builders, investors, operators, experts, and partner organizations backs people from the very start of their founder journey—pre-team or even pre-idea. Since 2018, we have helped create and invested in more than 900+ startups across a wide range of industries and technologies, with the goal of backing more than 6,000 by 2030.
A better future will not happen automatically—the world needs determined, ambitious, and resilient founders to build it. We are committed to supporting them and pursuing our vision of making progress inevitable.
We prioritize finding and supporting exceptional founders
We create an unrivaled environment for exceptional people
We take total responsibility and accountability for what we do
We keep raising the bar of what is possible
We are creative and optimize the way we spend our time and resources
We are one team, bringing the combined power of our global presence to everything we do
The Antler leadership team consists of serial entrepreneurs, experienced operators and seasoned investors.
As Partner in Central Europe, Christoph supports exceptional entrepreneurs along their journey - from entering into a cohort to building and scaling their ventures successfully. He draws on his background as Business Angel and Partner with McKinsey & Company. Before joining Antler he served a range of leading technology organizations, amongst others from the mobility and transportation space, on disruptive strategy and building innovative business models. Building and nurturing top talent organizations is one of his key passions and a great source of inspiration for Christoph.
Ronald Jan is an experienced operator, entrepreneur and investor, with expertise in a.o. e-commerce, fintech and healthtech. He has spent over a decade with various C-level roles in tech startups including Rocket Internet and Delivery Hero. Previously he has been a strategy consultant at Booz & Co and an investment banker at ABN Amro. INSEAD educated.
Anders is a professional leader with 15+ years of managerial experience from a range of industries, including FinTech, IT, education, telecom, banking/finance. He combines an entrepreneurial mindset with an analytical foundation as a former McKinsey consultant. Additionally, he possesses solid experience in international business from working across Europe, China, Africa, and USA. Anders speaks Mandarin Chinese on a professional level.
Kristian co-leads the Norwegian operations at Antler alongside Anne, where he leads both our fundraising and partnership efforts. Kristian is also responsible for building the ecosystem around Antler in Europe focusing on partnerships with commercial companies that want to contribute through their services and idea generation towards founders in the programs. He is also working on raising the European funds that invest in Antler's portfolio companies.
Michael started his career with The Boston Consulting Group. Since then, he has worked with building, scaling, and investing in startups. Michael has helped build and scale numerous companies as a co-founder, advisor, or angel-investor including two companies which have experienced exit events.
Livia is a full-stack marketing and communications expert obsessed with building brands. With 10 years' experience from startups in Stockholm and NYC, Livia previously ran fintech Tink’s marketing department and headed up community and content marketing at ecommerce platform Tictail. Livia is a lover of the Russian language, undercover interior designer and will help you set your marketing strategy, grow and attract customers.
Maiken has been operating, founding and advising technology startups for the past 8 years. Her experience spans across early stage technology startups and on to later stage billion dollar venture backed scaleups - operating across Europe and the US. She was an early employee in the FinTech unicorn Lunar, where she played a pivotal role and since then she’s been a founder herself as well as an award winning marketing executive, advisor and investor in multiple other tech companies.
Oscar, heading up Antler Stockholm, is an entrepreneur, expansion specialist and leader with 10 years' experience in building ventures across Africa, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. He previously co-founded BIMA, a global leader in mobile insurance, with 26M customers and has worked at Spotify, Kinnevik and Universal Avenue. He loves the outdoors and his favorite meal is freshly caught trout grilled over an open fire.
Sérgio is a Partner at Antler. Previously he was the Head of Expansion at Antler, leading the firm's growth to 21 geographies in 6 continents. Before, he was a Principal at Seaya Ventures, the largest Spanish VC fund with operations in Iberia and LatAm. Sérgio was previously a Managing Director at Linio Mexico, one of the largest e-commerce in LatAm, and before that, a Global Operations Director at Rocket Internet. Sergio was also on the founding team of Lazada in the Philippines. He started his career as a Fiber-optics engineer at Portugal Telecom. Sérgio holds an MBA from INSEAD (where he is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence), a BSc & an MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico and Post-graduate studies in Innovation from the Lisbon School of Economics.
Nitin brings 12+ years of experience in global venture capital, having invested in 100+ tech startups across stages, from being the first believer all the way to pre-IPO. Nitin learnt the ropes of the VC business in the US at NEA (one of the world’s largest funds) and was also an early executive at EverFi (acq. by Blackbaud for $750M). Nitin was part of the founding team at Lightbox Ventures, one of India’s leading funds (now $400M AUM). He then created his own micro-VC (FirstPrinciples) as a thesis-driven, early believer in 40+ startups, and was the first VC in India to focus on Web3. A Wharton graduate, Nitin has served on advisory boards/groups for the USC Viterbi School, NITI Aayog, AngelList India and TheBetterIndia.
Melalite is a Partner in Antler East Africa, supporting the Antler founders on tech and strategy. Her prior experience includes Oracle, Bain & Company, and Princeton Consultants. Melalite holds an MBA from INSEAD and a BA/MSC in Computer Science from Smith College and Rutgers University.
Markus is a Partner at Antler sharing the overall responsibility for Antler’s operations in Southeast Asia. Markus has worked with technology ventures in SEA for nearly a decade. Prior to Antler, Markus was in Venture Development Roles at Zalora and Global Fashion Group (GFG) based in Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore. He holds a Master’s degree in Banking and Finance from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland.
Erik Jonsson started his career in London's Square Mile as an investment banker after graduating with a degree in Investment and Financial Risk Management. After a month's trip to Vietnam in 2008, he fell in love with the country and decided to permanently move there in 2011-in fact, just crossing the decade-long milestone as a Vietnam resident a few months ago. He spent his first year in Vietnam with Vietnam Investments Group in the private equity space and subsequently ventured down the entrepreneurial path as Founder/Co-founder/CEO with five different ventures, including Zalora Vietnam. He was identified as one of Sweden's tech super talents by Dagens Industri in 2016. Erik is based in Ho Chi Minh City and is leading Antler's presence in Vietnam.
Gabriel was Head of Corporate Venture Capital at GS Retail, the retail subsidiary of Korean conglomerate GS Group. He has led many notable investments, including Moloco, Inc., currently valued at over USD $1.5 billion. He started his career as a consultant at Accenture Strategy, founded a WiseBros&Company, a B2B SaaS company to help universities restructure, worked at Rakuten CEO's Innovation Office helping the Japanese company expand into global markets, and led Bravestone Venture Partners where he made notable investments including seed investment in ImpriMed in the U.S.
Ryo Umezawa is a Partner leading Antler’s expansion into Japan. Prior to Antler, Ryo was a Principal at East Ventures, Japan, an early stage venture capital firm. As a serial entrepreneur, Ryo founded two companies, including AllCoupon Japan (acquired), and was Japan’s country manager for companies such as Tinder, Homeaway (Expedia Group) and Hailo. Ryo spent 10 years in the Philippines prior to studying International Business and Economics at Sophia University in Tokyo. Ryo has been selected as a Leader of Tomorrow at the 40th + 44th St. Gallen Symposium, as well as one of the first members of World Economic Forum, Global Shapers Community (GSC) in its Tokyo hub.
Alex has been a founder of VC funds. He has 12 years of experience working with outstanding founders throughout their life stages, from idea generation to IPO. He loves to discuss products, business models and global markets. His contribution helps founders to pivot into unicorns. He has been the lead early investor in three unicorns and two eventual IPOs. At Antler, Alex leads China theme investment: capturing global unicorns who leverage China strengths. Before Antler, Alex co-founded Alpha Startup Fund as Founding and Managing Partner. He was Co-Managing Partner at Sinovation Ventures and Partner at WI Harper Group, a San Francisco-Beijing-Taipei based cross-border VC. He was voted as China’s Top 100 Investors by Forbes China in 2021 and 2019.
Alex holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and serves as Co-President for Harvard Business School Association of Beijing.
Day zero investing means backing founders from the very beginning—whether it’s pre-team or even pre-idea—and continuing to support them on their company’s journey to greatness. We are there when a founder is at the starting line, when everything is possible and nothing is certain. When they have made the life-changing decision to take the leap and build a company, leaving conventional career paths behind. When their belief, passion, and drive are often the only things fueling them. And we are still there after we make our first investment, as a long-term partner providing advice, introductions, resources, and follow-on funding—all the way to their exit.
Our global community includes founders, investors, operators, experts, and partner organizations across six continents. Antler founders scale faster—from winning their first 100 customers and marketing a new product to raising their next round of funding—with the backing of 5,000+ fellow Antler founders across six continents. They learn from the best in the business through our advisor network of 600 leading operators, our sector-focused communities, and our monthly socials across our locations. And they are powered by curated people and resources for hiring, going to market, and fundraising, along with perks from leading tech providers. Antler founders have a home with us for life—no matter what direction their business or career takes, we’re committed to winning together.
We are not an accelerator or incubator, we’re the day zero investor. While we take huge pride in helping our founders develop, validate, and start scaling their idea and business model in a short period of time through our residencies around the world, we don’t launch and leave. We keep supporting our founders for the full life cycle of their company—from day zero to greatness.
Above all, we invest in people. We believe that every great company starts with a great team—and the strongest teams pursue the best ideas. Working with thousands of founders around the world, we have found that an amazing team with a mediocre idea in most cases will outperform a mediocre team with a great idea. And great teams will often pivot their idea after finding a more pressing or interesting problem to solve. If we decide to invest, it is first and foremost because we have high conviction that the team we are backing will be future winners and because we can and want to work with the team. Read our full investment philosophy.