What founders should be considering with the added complexity of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Antler Global Partner Andreas Birnik shares his tips for navigating through a turbulent time to successfully innovate.

As part of Antler’s mission to chart the path to recovery, we want to support teams working on solutions to these problems by investing in their startups.

The Covid-19 epidemic is now a Global issue and everyone is affected one way or the other. As most of us are remote working and in-person events are on hold, we want to continue to share some of the insights and sessions that we usually do for our founders with the wider startup ecosystem so that we can help and support entrepreneurs around the world.

Being a startup founder can be difficult at the best of times. Adding the stress and impact of a pandemic, crisis or recession, especially now, with the human tragedy of the Covid-19 doesn’t make it easier.

Some straightforward ways founders can help each other during turbulent times

There several ways in which entrepreneurs build their businesses and in recent years, quite a few startup ecosystem players have entered the journey in order to support Entrepreneurs in their endeavor. Antler, a startup generator and early-stage VC has brought a unique approach for aspiring entrepreneurs by creating a program that allows them to find their co-founding team, define their business idea and an opportunity to receive an investment all in 11 weeks. Check out the feature on #BBC Africa as we welcome our second cohort of the Nairobi program to #buildnextwaveoftech in the next 11 weeks.

Women make up 50% of the population but only 11% of capital is invested in female-led companies, even though data shows that diverse teams perform better. Antler wants to enable more women to launch and lead companies. Click to read the startup stories of 5 female founders and why they decided to become entrepreneurs.

Woman who participate in Antler’s program significantly increase their chance of leading their own company.

There has never been a better time to start a technology-enabled business, given how much low-cost and high-quality existing tech infrastructure can be used, the digital business opportunity in Southeast Asia with exponential growth in smartphone usage and most importantly, localised problems that need to be solved in many parts of this region on a large scale.

Whoever said Science was organized knowledge most likely had a point. What is less organized is the immense volume of research that is annually conducted. 2.3 trillion US Dollars are spent globally on Research and Development in 2019. More shockingly, it still takes pharmaceuticals approximately 15 years to bring a drug to the market - despite the given funds. What if we told you there was a way to reduce not just costs but also time by up to 25%?

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Math, Physics, Chemistry... Chances are high, it is one of these subjects that embodies the source of all evil for many students. The vast majority of parents who want to help their children excel in school and connect them with a private tutor are financially unable to do so. Enlight Ed CEO Artur Lorincz and CCO Sartou Djibril are dedicated to put an end to students falling behind in the curriculum solely because of the lack of access to educational help. Antler Amsterdam's Yingzhao Zhu got to chat with Artur and Sartou about their leading-edge approach to ending this battle of frustration.

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If you were told that something as elementary, yet complex, as data has pushed oil from its throne as the world's most valuable resource, would you believe it? Data has indeed become such an essential part of our everyday lives that it is impossible for many to envision a world without it. Self-driving cars, diagnostic in medicine, security systems -  they all rely on labeling data so it can be interpreted and decisions can be made accordingly. But what does data labeling actually mean? Put simply, it means that a computer is able to tell a dog apart from a car in images. Applied to medicine, this could mean that the computer was previously told what cancerous cells look like. Later, it is able to detect similar cells in new patients without the time-consuming manual reviews. The greatest challenge with data labeling is the unfathomable volume that it comes in. But no need to despair, LabelFuse is coming to the rescue, so beware.

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Schroders, along with Johan H. Andresen’s Ferd, and other prominent investors such as FinTech Collective, have invested in Antler, as we grow our Global platform to support founders in building fast-growing technology companies.

Liz Kaelin is an entrepreneur in the second Sydney program. Here's her advice for others who are about to join.