Your day zero global investors

Day zero has a different meaning for every founder. It could be the day they decide to quit their job to become a founder or the day they find a problem that they are passionate to solve. Or it could be the day they decide to raise their first institutional capital. Whatever day zero means to you, we want to be the first call you make. We put in day zero capital in the range of $500K and plug you into a robust global network to take your startup to the next level.

First believer at the first step of your entrepreneurial journey

Direct Pre-Seed

For existing teams

We are building the world’s largest and fastest-growing early-stage investment platform. Whether it is pre-team, pre-product or pre-revenue, we are the first believers for founders in India. We invest in the range of $500K and help their startups achieve product-market fit and enable global expansion in any category.

Apply For Pre-Seed Funding

Residency

For founders looking for co-founders

At Antler's India Residency, we are bringing exceptional builders together to meet, learn and co-create the companies of the future. Apply to be a part of India's most exclusive community of aspiring founders, where you can find a co-founder to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.

Learn More

Fellowship

For student founders

The Fellowship helps the country's brightest students turn their dorm-room startups into serious companies with an equity-free $10,000 grant, one-on-one mentorship by India's best founders and first institutional capital of $125,000. Applications are now open.

Learn More

Direct Pre-Seed

For existing teams

We are building the world’s largest and fastest-growing early-stage investment platform. Whether it is pre-team, pre-product or pre-revenue, we are the first believers for founders in India. We invest in the range of $500K and help their startups achieve product-market fit and enable global expansion in any category.

Apply For Pre-Seed Funding

Residency

For founders looking for co-founders

At Antler's India Residency, we are bringing exceptional builders together to meet, learn and co-create the companies of the future. Apply to be a part of India's most exclusive community of aspiring founders, where you can find a co-founder to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.

Learn More

Fellowship

For student founders

The Fellowship helps the country's brightest students turn their dorm-room startups into serious companies with an equity-free $10,000 grant, one-on-one mentorship by India's best founders and first institutional capital of $125,000. Applications are now open.

Learn More
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As investors, we have looked at over 25,000 founders in the last decade, and funded over 100 companies across various stages, sectors, and geographies. We have seen multiple companies go to IPO, delivered sizeable M&A outcomes, and worked closely with nearly 70 startups in helping them raise further rounds of funding from some of the world’s marquee funds. Here are some companies we have been first believers in:

Founder testimonials

Don't just take it from us. Hear from phenomenal people who joined Antler in India to launch their company.

Neha Juneja

IndiaP2P

The Antler team feels like an extension of one’s own team. I have some experience raising money before, but this is unique to Antler. They don't see you as investors, you are like their own team. Antler team understands how founders think about building as they’ve done it before.

Nikhil Jain

Bold Finance

Nitin and Rajiv pushed us to think beyond the horizon while remaining rational. We approached Antler with an idea but were unsure of the company's fundamentals. Rajiv and Nandini helped us lay the foundation and define it further.

Vistar Singh

Bookee

It is unlikely we would have made it to the next level without Antler's guidance. We constantly felt there were things we needed to understand, and Antler’s exposure helped with that. You have somebody with expertise in every area and having that all under one umbrella is really amazing!

Ronak Massand

Adaptive

Antler is by far my favourite entity on the cap table. The level of support and portfolio management is just incredible. No angel or even hustle fund comes close.

Leapfrog from Day Zero to Greatness

Globally, 68% of all Antler portfolio companies have raised their next round of funding. An extension of our founders’ teams: we don’t launch and leave. We are here to maximize their success for the entire life cycle of the company. From helping you find your first global customers to hiring a solid founding team and preparing for your next fundraise, our global platform is equipped with resources to leapfrog your startup to the next level.

Our founders scale faster:

• New age investment platform, IndiaP2P disbursed $1m+ worth of microfinance loans to over 1500 women borrowers in 8 months

• Building the country’s best intercity travel platform, ApniBus scaled to over 1 million transactions in 7 months

• PeakPerformer raised a $3M seed round from Sequoia Surge in less than 6 months to scale an organization’s most important asset: people

Entrepass Partner

The people behind Antler India

As builders, we have founded companies in E-commerce, Ed-Tech, Mobility, FinTech, and Web3, created products used by millions of people, hired early core teams, and raised capital across different stages.

Rajiv Srivatsa
Partner

Rajiv is a Partner in the Antler Bangalore office. He co-founded Urban Ladder (UL), India's top omni-channel furniture brand. Over ~8 years, UL raised over $100Mn in venture capital from top Indian VCs and changed the way Indians shop for furniture online. Prior to Urban Ladder, he served as a Senior Product Manager with Yahoo. He has been featured on GQ Influential Young Indians and repeatedly on the Fortune 40 Under 40 India list. Rajiv loves working with early-stage entrepreneurs on product, culture and brand to build scalable companies.

Nitin Sharma
Partner

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.

Lakshmikant PB
Head of Finance & Legal

Lakshmikant is the Head of Finance & Legal at Antler India. Lakshmikant has more than 19 years of experience in PE & VC Fund Management, NBFC Operations, and Banking Operations. Prior to joining Antler, Lakshmikant was a Consultant to T-Hub, a Startup accelerator based in Hyderabad, and helped their startups raise capital from Angels and VC investors. Prior to his role as a Consultant, he was the Finance Controller at SRI Capital, a US-based tech VC Fund where he set up their India operations and represented the fund on the board of portfolio companies. Before that, Lakshmikant spent 10 years at Caspian Impact Investments where he was the Chief Financial Officer. Prior to Caspian, Lakshmikant worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions and Citigroup. Lakshmikant holds an MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

Susmit Patodia
Capital Director

Susmit Patodia is the Capital Director at Antler India. Susmit started his career with Accenture Management Consulting.

After which he spent the last decade with Motilal Oswal, one of India's premier financial services company. He has held various leadership positions in Motilal from heading institutional equities sales business to portfolio management at the Asset Management Company.

He is a strong believer in India’s meteoric growth over the next decade and his focus is on “Antifragile investing in India”, “Don’t bet against India” and “Return to not normal but better”. Susmit is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and Madras University.

Gowri Shankar
Portfolio Director

Gowri Shankar leads the portfolio function at Antler. Prior to Antler, Gowri has a decade of deep experience in building and scaling internet businesses in India. He co-founded AllChemist (one of India’s first e-Pharmacy players), RoofandFloor (end-to-end real estate commerce platform) and STEP (English language testing platform) from scratch. He was part of the executive leadership team that scaled InMobi (largest independent Mobile advertising platform) and Medlife/Pharmeasy (e-Health market leader). He also transformed Cleartax’s (India’s largest SaaS platform) Enterprise/ B2B Business and set it up for scale.

Gowri received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru where he was awarded the Chairman’s Gold Medal.

Nandini Vishwanath
Program Director

Nandini is the Program Director at Antler India. She was previously the founder of GIGI Benefits (YC’20). Prior to her founder stint, she architected and led customer experience for Urban Ladder, India’s leading Furniture e-commerce startup. She holds a Masters Degree in Linguistics from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India and New Media Management from Syracuse University, NY.

Rahul Seth
Scouting Director

Rahul is the Scouting Director at Antler India. At Antler, he leads the process of identifying the most driven founders looking to build iconic companies. He has been an early stage operator, founder and angel investor in the Indian startup ecosystem, and has backed the founders of Pixxel, FamPay and Homingos. Rahul is an alumnus of BITS Pilani & The Indian Military Academy.

Ishavasyam Dash
Marketing Director

Ishavasyam Dash is the Marketing Director at Antler India. Previously, Isha was a part of the leadership team at Unacademy, where she helped launch and grow a new skill-based course platform. She also led brand marketing for Urban Ladder, helping it become one of India's most loved brands. Prior, she was at Dulux (AkzoNobel), where she launched the specialist paints category in India. Isha holds a Master's Degree in Marketing from NMIMS, Mumbai.

Vineet Agarwal
Investment Director

Vineet Agarwal is an Investment Manager at Antler India. He executes investments at Antler India and helps raise capital for Antler India Fund. In his last stint, he was a core member of the Strategy division at Ola and was involved in multiple fundraises ($500m+) and M&A activity across Ola Group. Previously, he was at Goldman Sachs (Investment Banking) where he worked on deals worth $40bn+. Vineet is a 2x founder, and founded Motorhood (a vehicle maintenance startup) & BluGanesha Airwaves (a proximity marketing venture). He holds an MBA from NMIMS Mumbai and a Bachelors in Commerce from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata.

Rohan Kohli
Portfolio Management

Rohan is a part of the Portfolio Management team at Antler India.Post his under-graduation from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he joined a 0-to-1 SaaS expert network startup Lynk Global as one of the founding members at their India office. Following the success of this office, Rohan moved to New York and Toronto to set up Lynk's North America business.His most recent stint involved leading growth and GTM initiatives at xto10x, a startup that supports other companies in their scaling journey.

Samiksha Agarwal
Investment Associate

Samiksha works as an Investment Associate with Antler India. She focuses on Founder Scouting, where she helps identify super passionate founders building for the future. Prior to this, she worked as an Analyst at 3one4 Capital and interned with EY in Zurich in the TAS department. She is an alumnus of The Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of St. Gallen, and IE Business School.

Karan Prasad
Program Associate

Karan is the Program Associate for the Antler India cohorts and plays an active role in enabling partnerships for our global portfolio. Prior to joining Antler, he worked across business development and community management across SaaS and cloud verticals. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from BMS College of Engineering.

Neha Reddy
Marketing Analyst

Neha is the Marketing Analyst at Antler India. Previously, she was a part of the founding team at leap.club, a community-led professional network for women where she worked on marketing and engagement.

Reetik Agarwal
Investment Associate

Reetik works as an Investment Associate with Antler India. He focuses on Investments, where he builds thesis & identify trends in the market, performs due diligence on companies and makes investment recommendations.

Sankalp Sharma
Investment Associate

Sankalp works as an Investment Associate with Antler India. He focuses on building our founder network and identifying super passionate founders building for the future. Prior to this, he spent 5 years working with LocoNav in multiple leadership roles across Operations and Strategy. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.

Varun Bengani
Investment Analyst

Varun is a part of the Investments team at Antler India, focusing on early-stage consumer internet businesses, D2C brands & Web 3. He holds a Bachelors degree in Commerce from St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata where he pursued Chartered Accountancy and dropped out as a finalist.

Ojasvi Srivastava
Portfolio Analyst

Ojasvi is the part of the portfolio team at Antler India. Previously, he was working closely with two early stage startups in product management & fundraising.

Neharika Garg
Investment Associate

Neharika works as an Investment Associate with Antler India. Prior to this, she was an early member of GOAT Brand Labs (e-commerce rollup/house of brands player) and did stints across M&A and Category where where she analysed and invested in consumer brands and supported the growth of the portfolio. Neharika is an alumnus of The Shri Ram College of Commerce.

Gowri Shankar
Portfolio Director

Gowri Shankar leads the portfolio function at Antler. Prior to Antler, Gowri has a decade of deep experience in building and scaling internet businesses in India. He co-founded AllChemist (one of India’s first e-Pharmacy players), RoofandFloor (end-to-end real estate commerce platform) and STEP (English language testing platform) from scratch. He was part of the executive leadership team that scaled InMobi (largest independent Mobile advertising platform) and Medlife/Pharmeasy (e-Health market leader). He also transformed Cleartax’s (India’s largest SaaS platform) Enterprise/ B2B Business and set it up for scale.

Gowri received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru where he was awarded the Chairman’s Gold Medal.

Apply @ Antler India
Vineet Agarwal
Investment Director

Vineet Agarwal is an Investment Manager at Antler India. He executes investments at Antler India and helps raise capital for Antler India Fund. In his last stint, he was a core member of the Strategy division at Ola and was involved in multiple fundraises ($500m+) and M&A activity across Ola Group. Previously, he was at Goldman Sachs (Investment Banking) where he worked on deals worth $40bn+. Vineet is a 2x founder, and founded Motorhood (a vehicle maintenance startup) & BluGanesha Airwaves (a proximity marketing venture). He holds an MBA from NMIMS Mumbai and a Bachelors in Commerce from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata.

Varun Bengani
Investment Analyst

Varun is a part of the Investments team at Antler India, focusing on early-stage consumer internet businesses, D2C brands & Web 3. He holds a Bachelors degree in Commerce from St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata where he pursued Chartered Accountancy and dropped out as a finalist.

Susmit Patodia
Capital Director

Susmit Patodia is the Capital Director at Antler India. Susmit started his career with Accenture Management Consulting.

After which he spent the last decade with Motilal Oswal, one of India's premier financial services company. He has held various leadership positions in Motilal from heading institutional equities sales business to portfolio management at the Asset Management Company.

He is a strong believer in India’s meteoric growth over the next decade and his focus is on “Antifragile investing in India”, “Don’t bet against India” and “Return to not normal but better”. Susmit is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and Madras University.

Samiksha Agarwal
Investment Associate

Samiksha works as an Investment Associate with Antler India. She focuses on Founder Scouting, where she helps identify super passionate founders building for the future. Prior to this, she worked as an Analyst at 3one4 Capital and interned with EY in Zurich in the TAS department. She is an alumnus of The Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of St. Gallen, and IE Business School.

Rohan Kohli
Portfolio Management

Rohan is a part of the Portfolio Management team at Antler India.Post his under-graduation from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, he joined a 0-to-1 SaaS expert network startup Lynk Global as one of the founding members at their India office. Following the success of this office, Rohan moved to New York and Toronto to set up Lynk's North America business.His most recent stint involved leading growth and GTM initiatives at xto10x, a startup that supports other companies in their scaling journey.

Rajiv Srivatsa
Partner

Rajiv is a Partner in the Antler Bangalore office. He co-founded Urban Ladder (UL), India's top omni-channel furniture brand. Over ~8 years, UL raised over $100Mn in venture capital from top Indian VCs and changed the way Indians shop for furniture online. Prior to Urban Ladder, he served as a Senior Product Manager with Yahoo. He has been featured on GQ Influential Young Indians and repeatedly on the Fortune 40 Under 40 India list. Rajiv loves working with early-stage entrepreneurs on product, culture and brand to build scalable companies.

Reetik Agarwal
Investment Associate

Reetik works as an Investment Associate with Antler India. He focuses on Investments, where he builds thesis & identify trends in the market, performs due diligence on companies and makes investment recommendations.

Rahul Seth
Scouting Director

Rahul is the Scouting Director at Antler India. At Antler, he leads the process of identifying the most driven founders looking to build iconic companies. He has been an early stage operator, founder and angel investor in the Indian startup ecosystem, and has backed the founders of Pixxel, FamPay and Homingos. Rahul is an alumnus of BITS Pilani & The Indian Military Academy.

Nitin Sharma
Partner

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.

Neha Reddy
Marketing Analyst

Neha is the Marketing Analyst at Antler India. Previously, she was a part of the founding team at leap.club, a community-led professional network for women where she worked on marketing and engagement.

Nandini Vishwanath
Program Director

Nandini is the Program Director at Antler India. She was previously the founder of GIGI Benefits (YC’20). Prior to her founder stint, she architected and led customer experience for Urban Ladder, India’s leading Furniture e-commerce startup. She holds a Masters Degree in Linguistics from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India and New Media Management from Syracuse University, NY.

Lakshmikant PB
Head of Finance & Legal

Lakshmikant is the Head of Finance & Legal at Antler India. Lakshmikant has more than 19 years of experience in PE & VC Fund Management, NBFC Operations, and Banking Operations. Prior to joining Antler, Lakshmikant was a Consultant to T-Hub, a Startup accelerator based in Hyderabad, and helped their startups raise capital from Angels and VC investors. Prior to his role as a Consultant, he was the Finance Controller at SRI Capital, a US-based tech VC Fund where he set up their India operations and represented the fund on the board of portfolio companies. Before that, Lakshmikant spent 10 years at Caspian Impact Investments where he was the Chief Financial Officer. Prior to Caspian, Lakshmikant worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions and Citigroup. Lakshmikant holds an MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

Karan Prasad
Program Associate

Karan is the Program Associate for the Antler India cohorts and plays an active role in enabling partnerships for our global portfolio. Prior to joining Antler, he worked across business development and community management across SaaS and cloud verticals. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from BMS College of Engineering.

Ishavasyam Dash
Marketing Director

Ishavasyam Dash is the Marketing Director at Antler India. Previously, Isha was a part of the leadership team at Unacademy, where she helped launch and grow a new skill-based course platform. She also led brand marketing for Urban Ladder, helping it become one of India's most loved brands. Prior, she was at Dulux (AkzoNobel), where she launched the specialist paints category in India. Isha holds a Master's Degree in Marketing from NMIMS, Mumbai.

Cathy Guo
Portfolio and Investment Manager

Cathy Guo is a Portfolio and Investment Manager at Antler India. Previously, Cathy was the CEO and Co-Founder of Dunya Labs, building developer tools for decentralized applications. She was also a founding team member at True Beacon, a new-age asset management company formed by the founders of Zerodha, and led early-stage venture investments in companies such as Clinikk and Stayqrious at First Principles, an early-stage seed fund in Bangalore. Cathy has a degree in Economics and Philosophy from Columbia University. She is the co-author of Myth of the Entrepreneur, a book on social entrepreneurship published by Harper Collins India.

High conviction-driven Day Zero investing

Insights that give you a window into emerging trends as we see them.

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Investing in InspeCity and the mission to build cities in space

InspeCity is building propulsion and in-space servicing to enable space cities in the future.

Unpacking the $80+ billion ONDC opportunity: India’s next startup catalyst

India's approach to unbundle payments made the world look up and take notice. Now it's time to disrupt commerce with the Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC. In our latest Theory of Next deep dive we mapped, researched, and reached out to every network participant live on ONDC right now.


And we're excited to share with you a comprehensive what could be India's next unicorn catalyst with inputs from Vibhor Jain (COO of ONDC), Sujith Nair (Founding member of Beckn Protocol), and founders building on ONDC!

Co-authored by Nitin Sharma (Partner, Antler) and Gokul Kumaravelu.

AI: Humanity’s Miracle Machine, Part I

In this multi-part series, we explore everything from the origins and evolution of AI to the future AI landscape and how future founders can be a part of it.

The 2nd installment of the series (click here) is also live for anyone interested in jumping right to how the AI landscape will pan out and what future founders need to know.

AI: Humanity's Miracle Machine, Part II

In the second installment of our multi-part series we dive deeper into the different layers of AI value stack and how future founders can find their cutting edge in this rapidly evolving ecosystem.

Note: This is part 2 of a multi-part AI series. If you are interested in understanding why AI will be an era-defining technology and the key terms associated with it, please read part 1 (click here) before you begin part 2.

Electric Vehicles: A roadmap to mass adoption in India

First appeared in The Economic Times. Head here for the story.

The future of mobility is at a critical point of inflection. Every time oil prices spike or climate change is debated and discussed, Electric Vehicles (EVs) are inevitably mentioned as a part of the solution. Yet, despite several new Indian companies entering various parts of the EV value chain, significant capital infused in the space, and large-scale execution efforts, EVs are not mainstream yet. It is 2021 and it seems we have hit the inflection point for EVs to take off, finally.

Mental Healthcare is in need of disruption. Can tech startups keep India sane?

It is always great to see more and more people willing to address mental health issues. Yet, as the conversation around mental health slowly expands, it also exposes the reality of crumbling support structures, lowered resilience levels, and the multiple failing points across our public and private healthcare systems. This is disheartening. The process of accepting that one needs help is difficult enough itself, the other steps needed in this journey should not add to the difficulty.

DAOs and Web3 Governance: The Promise, Implications and Challenges Ahead

The past two years in crypto have been absolutely astounding. From “DeFi summer” (now $250bn+ of total value locked) to “NFT craze” ($3.4bn monthly GMV on Opensea alone in August 2021) to Solana’s epic rise and various memecoin’s ultimate downfalls – the sheer pace of adoption and activity across the crypto ecosystem has been an incredible force.

Every venture fund in the world is currently deepening or developing a crypto thesis. Talent from traditional industries is pouring into crypto. And we now have an overarching, epochal narrative to define the movement: web3.

Amongst all the areas to focus on, I have chosen to write about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The reason for this is as follows:

  • Incentive Innovation Rules All. Bitcoin provided a practical solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem by introducing an incentive innovation. In fact, much of crypto is about remixing existing technology with new incentives to create powerful new paradigms. DAOs are the natural frontier of incentive design in web3.
  • Capital Power. The DeFi ecosystem, with $250bn total value locked (TVL), is the current “super-app” of web3. While only ~$10bn of DeFi TVL (~4%) is currently held in DAOs, this number will likely increase exponentially as more and more DeFi protocols progressively decentralize governance. More money, more power – DeFi Treasury DAOs have the potential for massively influencing web3 in 2022 and beyond as capital power grows.
  • Web3 Promise. If the promise of web3 (versus web2) is to reduce centralized power in private, opaque corporate structures, then functional, community-led DAOs are a key prerequisite for the web3 promise to be fulfilled.

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