WELCOME TO ANTLER INSIGHTS

Why we believe the moment for Physical AI and Robotics has finally arrived, our early thinking about the opportunity, and where we are placing our bets.

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The strength of our conviction in Homie starts with a founding team that has lived the problem they are solving. Markku Vuorinen, the CEO, brings years of experience driving growth at Visma and the fintech scaleup Contractbook.

The QMill team joined Antler with a mission to make today's imperfect quantum hardware actually useful. They developed circuit compression algorithms that set records on the LUMI supercomputer — one of the world's most powerful — and shortly after, succeeded in raising €4M in seed funding led by Maki.vc.

Software encodes process. AI changes who can do the encoding but it doesn't change the need for someone to know what should be encoded.

If you are founding a startup in 2026, you are living in a paradox. It has never been easier to build a product, yet it has never been harder to build a thriving business.

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Most founders wait for a market to form before they build. Harrison Kennedy did the opposite. Years before demand crystallised, before organisations knew what to look for, and before the problem had a category, he was already designing the solution.

Founders like to work hard, but do they work smart? 

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When it comes to the creator economy, Arthur Leopold is a heavyweight. He talks to Antler’s Jeff Becker about his unstoppable drive, and the vast untapped opportunity in the creator space

In medicine you can’t simply “move fast and break things”. So how do you build a breakout startup? 

That tension was at the heart of a panel hosted by Antler Japan Senior Director Florian Geier at YOKOHAMA CONNÉCT, where Fuminori Gunji, Head of GTM at ZooKeep, and Paul McMahon, Representative Director of TokyoDev, joined a room of founders and operators to unpack what it really takes to build global teams from Japan. The conversation was grounded in something rare in startup discourse: actual data.

Crux COO and co-founder Allen Kramer has attracted heavy-hitting investors to his latest startup. It’s a story about discipline – and timing

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Physical AI only improves when deployed in real production environments. Korea offers one of the fastest paths to industrial deployment, data, and scale.

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