WELCOME TO ANTLER INSIGHTS

It's 2023. Women should be able to pursue any career they choose and have an equal playing field to thrive in it.

‍

While we would like to believe this is true, the reality is very different.

Antler was founded on the belief that people innovating is the key to building a better future. In our content series—”It All Starts with People”—we spotlight the exceptional founders we have the privilege of partnering with around the world. Each story is a window into their passions, motivations, and vision—the reasons they are building and the positive dent they are aiming to make on the world.

‍

This time we sat down with Filippo Nigro to talk about his journey and why he decided to build his company with Antler in Berlin.

Cameo is the world's largest celebrity marketplace. With Cameo, you can access thousands of celebrities and request a personalized video message for any occasion from your favorite stars.

Arthur Leopold recognized the potential of selfies becoming the new autographs. He quickly joined Cameo as the first employee (COO) and invested in the startup's friends and family round. Arthur spent over 5.5 years with Cameo, serving as President through January 2023. While Arthur recently stepped down as President to start his own company, he remains a Senior Advisor and an ardent supporter of the team.

We recorded this podcast while Arthur was Cameo's acting President. In this episode of Early Days, Arthur talks about the first Cameo that started it all, combatting the chicken-egg problem in marketplaces, finding near instantaneous product-market fit with fans, and Cameo's distinctive celebrity acquisition strategy.

Have you ever had an idea for a really awesome product, but you get stuck because you don't know how to write code? Well, today's guest, Emmanuel Straschnov, is solving that problem as the founder and CEO of Bubble.io. Emmanuel and his co-founder, Josh, wanted to put the ability to write software at the fingertips of the entire world. In 2012, they started Bubble, and set out to build a no-code platform that equips anyone to write beautiful software. Listen to this episode of Early Days to learn how Emmanuel and Josh bootstrapped for seven years before taking external capital, building Bubble into a unicorn in the process.

‍

Meet Piet Hein van Dam, co-founder of Clear, who is using data—not pills—to help millions of people with type 2 diabetes eliminate the disease within three months.

Four years and one Fund on, a lot has changed at Antler Australia. In this new series, the global early-stage VC reveals how it's working with founders from day zero, path to its first 100 Australian investments, introduces two new Partners, and announces some of the best terms for founders in the country.

As humans, we are always pushed into communal environments. It starts when you are a toddler and your parents drop you off at a kindergarten and ends with you signing up to a retirement home to spend your slower days playing Bingo with fellow retirees. This constant change and development of the communities around us, end up forming our personalities more than we would like to admit. In the first couple decades of our life it’s mostly about being practical–age and location are the determining factors of the communities around us. As we progress through life, we get to make more independent decisions which feel absolutely fantastic at first. But very quickly, we grow accustomed to that sense of freedom and we lose that tingling, childish sensation of excitement whenever a big change is coming up.

A team from the Antler India Fellowship cohort, Cattle Guru is building a one-stop shop for Bharat farmers.

‍

We are thrilled to back 16-year-old Tejas Ravishankar as he builds a robust productivity and experience platform for open-source developers.

Despite growing calls to create a more inclusive venture capital ecosystem and remove the barriers to entrepreneurship, only a fraction of funding is raised by founders from underrepresented communities.

‍

The first step towards change is quantifying the challenge. While in-depth research has been conducted about women founders and founders from ethnic minority backgrounds, data has never existed about tech founders from the LGBTQ+ community—until now.

A look back at 2022, a record year for the leading day zero investor in Europe—showcasing investment activity and key predictions for the early-stage tech ecosystem in 2023.

Antler is proud to join forces with Microsoft for Startups to support rising entrepreneurs—starting with 23 non-dilutive grants to women founders in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America—and reduce the barriers to startup success. Meet some of these founders.