Introducing Antler's Visiting Partners in the US
The Antler team in the US is thrilled to introduce our inaugural class of Visiting Partners who will be coaching and supporting founders participating in our US Fall Residencies this October across Austin, Boulder, and NYC. These Visiting Partners are former founders who have successfully built and, in aggregate, raised over $1 billion dollars of venture capital funding for their respective companies.
We are excited to introduce these Visiting Partners to our founders who are just starting out on their path from day zero to greatness. They will participate in residency events and office hours to provide mentorship, expertise, and insight, guiding founders through the critical early stages of their startup journey.
Read more about our tremendous Visiting Partners and the companies they’ve scaled below. Applications still open - learn more about our Fall Residency at an upcoming AMA (register here)!
Ajay Kori
Ajay Kori is the co-founder of Novilla Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company developing an opioid alternative to pain therapeutics through patented drug delivery methods. Ajay is also a co-founder of Allay Lamp, which has pioneered narrow-banded green light therapy for headaches. Previously, Ajay co-founded UrbanStems, an online gifting company that provides on-demand flower delivery services, which raised $48 million in funding from investors like SWaN, Legend Venture Partners, DFE Capital Management, Motley Fool Ventures, Gordon Segal, Gaingels, and PAN. Ajay remains as Chairman of the Board at UrbanStems. He earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and his B.S. from Duke University.
Alex Lieberman
Alex Lieberman is the co-founder and Chairman of Morning Brew. Alex launched Morning Brew as a senior in college to empower modern business leaders with need-to-know content that is engaging and timely. Alex recently co-founded StoryArb, a modern executive’s personal media company. StoryArb helps entrepreneurs and executives build their brands on platforms like X and LinkedIn. Alex is the host of Founder’s Journal and 60 Second Startup. He lives with his wife in Hoboken and minibernedoodle. In his spare time, Alex loves to ski, golf, build legos, and shoot photography.
Betsy Fore
Betsy Fore is a serial venture-backed startup founder and investor. She is the co-founder of Tiny Organics (USDA-certified organic baby & toddler food delivery), WonderWoof (a dog health and activity tracker), and the non-profit Natives Rising (empowering Native Americans in tech and startups). As the first Native American woman to ever raise a Series A, Betsy has earned a spot on Entrepreneur's 100 Women of Impact driving real change in business and culture. Betsy is also ranked one of BBC's 100 Most Inspiring Women and on Forbes 30 under 30. With over two decades of experience, Betsy is a product leader and investor at XFactor Ventures and LongJump Fund.
Harpaul Sambhi
Harpaul Sambhi is the founder and CEO of Magical, a company focused on reducing monotony and pain in everyday tasks through simple, effective automation. Magical has raised $41m total in funding from the likes of Coatue, Greylock, Bain, Lightspeed, SV Angel, Blank Ventures, and Box Group and has automated over 1 billion tasks for more than 10,000 companies globally. Prior to Magical, Harpaul was the founder and CEO of Careerify which was acquired by LinkedIn.
Nathan Kondamuri
Nathan Kondamuri is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pair Eyewear, a company that provides customizable glasses and sunglasses. Nathan and his co-founder launched Pair Eyewear while they were undergraduates at Stanford. After appearing on Shark Tank, they raised $12 million in Series A funding. They then raised $60 million in Series B funding to expand their product line. Pair Eyewear’s investors include New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Javelin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Precursor Ventures, and Gingerbread Capital.
Bill Burnett
Bill Burnett is a serial entrepreneur with a focus on SaaS. In 2013, he founded PointDrive, a B2B buyer engagement tool, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2016. Following the acquisition of PointDrive, Bill joined LinkedIn where he spearheaded the integration of PointDrive into LinkedIn's ecosystem and now leads Global Solutions within LinkedIn's Sales Solutions business, an organization he founded.
Tim Specht
Tim Specht is a founder and startup executive with deep roots in both zero to one and growth-stage environments across the US and Europe. Tim was the co-founder and CTO of video platform Dubsmash. Tim raised over $20 million from top-tier VCs (Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Balderton, Eniac, Lowercase Capital, and more) and grew Dubsmash to 250 million installs and 160 million users. Dubsmash was acquired by Reddit in December 2020. Post-acquisition, Tim served as Director of Engineering at Reddit. He's now excited to share his expertise and hands-on approach with early stage founders and startups.
Lance Johnson
Lance Johnson is an investor and operator. Most recently, Lance was the CEO of Recurrent Media (where he built a $100 million revenue business and raised $400 million in funding, including $300 million from Blackstone). Previously, Lance was the Head of Corporate Development at Naspers/Prosus in Amsterdam and SF. He has worked at board-level in San Francisco, NYC, Munich, Amsterdam and London with global business expansion experience in China, Japan, India, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America across all stages of the business lifecycle as a CEO and GM.
Kevin Baum
Kevin Baum is the CEO and co-founder of AgriWebb, an Australian headquartered SaaS business that is the global market leader in its segment. Kevin has successfully grown the business through several rounds of fundraising, international expansion across five continents, and M&A. Kevin loves working as a mentor to early stage companies and speaking about entrepreneurship. He has mentored for Techstars, the CU Deming Center for Entrepreneurship and privately with early-stage businesses for over five years now.
JC Glancy
JC Glancy is the founder of ZenBusiness Inc., an Austin based unicorn platform that helps small business owners start, run, and grow their business all in one, centralized place. JC grew ZenBusiness from $0 to $100m of ARR in less than 5 years and, through the process, had a hand in starting over 600k businesses across the US. ZenBusiness has raised close to $200 million in funding from investors like Oak HC/FT, Softbank, Cathay Innovation, and Greycroft to empower entrepreneurs to create successful businesses. Originally from Cleveland, JC now lives in Austin, TX and loves traveling, snowboarding, and mountain biking.
Bill Tyndall
Bill Tyndall is a serial entrepreneur who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his combined companies with an exit in 2020. He is currently the CEO of Tynrose which is a digital transformation platform focused on making IT and cyber security more accessible for small to medium sized businesses.
Aaron Perman
Aaron Perman is a Partner at S3 Ventures, the largest venture capital firm focused on Texas, where he invests, advises, and serves on boards of business-to-business technology companies. He was previously CEO at Qualia Media, a marketing technology platform, and led it to its acquisition by IDify. Earlier in his career, Aaron invested in publicly traded companies at Western Standard, a long/short equity hedge fund.
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