WE INVEST IN INDIA’S MOST EXTRAORDINARY INDIVIDUALS FROM DAY ZERO TO GREATNESS

We invest in people. People with the ambition to build large companies.

Through our Residencies globally, we work with and invest in the most exceptionally talented individuals and early teams. Leveraging our global footprint of 27 locations and over 1,000+ investments, we are building the world’s fastest-growing investment platform that helps founders build and scale startups faster. Antler is here to maximize success for the entire life cycle of a startup—from being the earliest backer to a long-term capital partner who provides follow-on funding, startup scaling support through our portfolio platform and access to additional top VCs.

Join Antler to validate your idea, build your team, and access capital to launch and scale your company. 

NOW OPEN FOR EARLY TEAMS AND SOLO FOUNDERS. APPLY TO THE COHORT STARTING IN JUNE 2024. Applications close on 15th May 2024.

WE BACK TOP TALENT TO BUILD GREAT COMPANIES

Over 3 years, more than 40,000 founders have applied and over 300 ambitious individuals and teams have partnered with Antler in India to build and launch their companies. We partner with experienced business operators, serial entrepreneurs, technologists, or domain experts who have the ambition to build game-changing businesses.

Whether you are an entrepreneur seeking a co-founder or an idea; or an early team seeking to validate ideas and expedite growth, Antler is the ideal environment to bring your vision to life. We accept applications from both individuals and teams.

Individuals

With the ambition to found a company

Pre- or post-idea and pre-product.

Exceptional individuals join Antler before the inception of their company to find a co-founder(s) and raise their first institutional capital. We support these founders through co-founding team formation, idea validation, personalized coaching from serial entrepreneurs and ecosystem experts, access to the world’s largest-growing community of like-minded entrepreneurs, and a first investment of INR 2 crores for 9% of equity.

Teams

Looking to validate their idea & raise capital

Early teams with an idea are also welcome to join Antler Residency. Teams are generally at the stage of validating their idea, building the early product, or gearing up for launch. Teams looking for a third co-founder are also welcome to apply. We help teams with idea validation, dedicated expert sparring sessions, industry connections, and a strong local & global network. This residency runs in parallel to the one with individual founders but may include a potential early Investment Committee meeting as early as Week 4 with fixed terms of INR 2 crores for 9% of equity.

Before Day Zero

Community

Before Day Zero is an invite-only exclusive community designed to help India’s top talent figure out their next big move. Be it building a billion-dollar company or exploring a contrarian way of solving something archaic. Enjoy the company of like-minded individuals, engage in meaningful social and professional conversations and build a network that will fuel your entrepreneurial dreams.

Join the waitlist

A CLEAR ADVANTAGE FROM DAY ZERO

From day zero, we provide access to idea validation, co-founder matching, personalized coaching, access to a local and global network of founders and advisors, India ecosystem expertise, day zero investment and support with follow-on funding. Having invested in 1,000+ companies and supported 8000+ entrepreneurs through our programs in 27 locations globally, we know what works and what doesn't. This helps us better support our founders and help maximize their chances of success. The Residency is in-person in Bangalore and runs for a period of 12 weeks, but can be accelerated for formed teams to as short as 4 weeks.

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Join a community of exceptional founders and build your team

  • Meet 80+ exceptional potential co-founders - tech, business, and domain experts selected from over 3,000 applicants.
  • Join a supportive and like-minded community that is committed to building venture-scale companies.
  • Receive an INR 1L for individuals and INR 1.5L for early teams as a one-time grant to cover expenses, free office space, and $1M+ worth of founder perks.

Validate and launch your idea

  • Work in a high-intensity environment to achieve the fastest progress towards idea clarity and launch.
  • Leverage our best-in-class resources for ideation and Antler designed effective frameworks for idea validation.
  • Access company-building knowledge from seasoned operators, unicorn founders and the Antler team.
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Access capital and scale your company

  • Pitch for your first investment of INR 2 crores for 9% of equity (We do not take any program fees from the founders). For existing teams, get a potential early Investment Committee meeting as early as Week 4.
  • Post-investment, you get to be a part of 'Antler Forward', our portfolio support platform that's individually tailored for each startup's needs. Accelerate towards your early PMF in 3 to 4 months and access a network of prominent investors to raise your next round.
  • Antler association does not end here. Through our $285M global continuity fund, we continue to back founders through the life cycle of their companies.

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As investors, we have backed 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:

HEAR FROM FOUNDERS WHO JOINED ANTLER IN INDIA TO LAUNCH THEIR COMPANY

Dr. Karan Raj Jaggi

Co-founder, Guardians; Ex-Global Product Head at Aktivhealth

Antler India Residency was a truly transformational experience for me. Having worked at multiple startups, I always had a strong desire to eventually start on my own entrepreneurial journey, but coming from a core medical background, I lacked a concrete playbook to put the plans in motion. AIR not only provided me with all the tools & resources that were needed but most importantly also highlighted that it’s okay to not have all the answers!

Nayona Roy

Co-founder, Unsuit; Ex-Head of Legal at Qyuki Digital Media

Not only did my co-founder and I meet at Antler, but the final pivot, the pitch, the way we viewed the market, and the rigour and tempo that we needed to bring in were all closely led by the Antler team. Unsuit is a startup that is not just funded by Antler but also orchestrated by them.

Yash Sheel Srivastava

Co-founder, Unsuit; Ex-Managing Director at Coda Payments

The Residency is a fast-paced, well-structured program to look out for teammates and validate your ideas. The depth of talent within the cohort helped me work through invalidating multiple ideas with different people before I locked down on what I’d work on. The office hours and sessions are curated to work through the lifecycle of going live from ideation to validation to development. The team at Antler is extremely insightful and operates like a peer and advisor deeply invested in your success. Without the Residency, I would certainly have made much less progress on my entrepreneurial journey. This program is tailor-made for those who want to find the right co-founders and move forward at lightning speed.

Vignesh Baskaran

Co-founder, Hexo.ai; Ex-Senior Data Scientist at Clarivate

I was actively looking for a co-founder for more than a year. I tried multiple co-founder matching programs and nothing worked out. Finally, I met my wonderful co-founder Kunal through AIR and it has been a fantastic journey ever since. Very grateful to the folks at Antler. They are not only investors but also have been operators. So they have founders first mindset and that is the best part of Antler!

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.

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.

Hitesh Bhuraria

Co-founder, Sangti; Ex-Senior Manager at Bain & Company

Antler Residency Program has been a critical turning point in my entrepreneurial journey. Access to a curated set of high-potential founders, 1-1 brainstorming sessions with the Antler team, and information sessions with industry experts have helped refine our idea and accelerate our go-to-market. 9 months on from the program, I am building a climate tech platform with my co-founder, whom I met at Antler Residency and a team of 8 that has been enabled by the subsequent funding support.

ANTLER FOUNDERS SCALE FASTER

We exist to increase our founders’ speed and success rate in solving important problems. They scale faster—from winning their first 100 customers, and hiring a solid founding team to raising their next round of funding—with the backing of 8,000+ fellow Antler founders across six continents.

  • New-age investment platform, IndiaP2P has disbursed loans to more than 15000 women entrepreneurs within 24 months of launch.
  • Intercity bus travel platform for Bharat, Apnibus has enabled ~2 million bus tickets per month for intercity travellers in Rajasthan through their POS solution within 24 months of launch.
  • ONDC Technology Service Provider (TSP), Plotch.ai, within 9 months of launch, has signed up 18+ enterprise clients for ONDC and has enabled enterprises to go live on ONDC in under 2 weeks.
  • Full stack carbon management platform, Sangti has tracked carbon emissions from 50 million shipments and measured 2.5 M tCO2e within 9 months of launch.
Entrepass Partner

THE PEOPLE BEHIND ANTLER IN INDIA

As builders, we have founded companies in E-commerce, HealthTech, PropTech, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Associate

Neha is the Marketing Associate 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.

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.

Dravisha Katoch
Community Lead

Dravisha is the Community Lead at Antler India. Her strength lies in the cusp of growth, marketing, and community. She has led growth and marketing for community-led startups such as Basis and leap.club previously. She's also helped founders build successful startups in the 0 to 1 phase across SaaS, EdTech, MediaTech, and DeepTech in the past 5 years.

Divita Aggarwal
Capital Associate

Divita is a Capital Associate at Antler India. Previously, Divita was a founder at 73 Boston, India’s first wine & spirits brand created specifically for the Indian taste palate. She studied Economics at Ashoka University and got her MBA from Masters’ Union. Divita is also a passionate writer and a published author of two books. Her latest non-fiction book was a documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic and was appreciated by literary veterans like Dr Shashi Tharoor.

Vignesh Prasad
Finance Analyst

Vignesh works as a Finance Analyst at Antler India. Prior to joining Antler, Vignesh worked as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs. He is a qualified ACCA Affiliate, having obtained multiple global ranks in the process. He holds a Bachelor's degree from St. Joseph's College of Commerce, Bangalore specialising in International Accounting and Finance.

Dravisha Katoch
Community Lead

Dravisha is the Community Lead at Antler India. Her strength lies in the cusp of growth, marketing, and community. She has led growth and marketing for community-led startups such as Basis and leap.club previously. She's also helped founders build successful startups in the 0 to 1 phase across SaaS, EdTech, MediaTech, and DeepTech in the past 5 years.

Divita Aggarwal
Capital Associate

Divita is a Capital Associate at Antler India. Previously, Divita was a founder at 73 Boston, India’s first wine & spirits brand created specifically for the Indian taste palate. She studied Economics at Ashoka University and got her MBA from Masters’ Union. Divita is also a passionate writer and a published author of two books. Her latest non-fiction book was a documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic and was appreciated by literary veterans like Dr Shashi Tharoor.

Vignesh Prasad
Finance Analyst

Vignesh works as a Finance Analyst at Antler India. Prior to joining Antler, Vignesh worked as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs. He is a qualified ACCA Affiliate, having obtained multiple global ranks in the process. He holds a Bachelor's degree from St. Joseph's College of Commerce, Bangalore specialising in International Accounting and Finance.

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.

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.

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.

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 Manager

Samiksha works as an Investment Manager 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 works with a portfolio of early-stage SaaS and Consumer startups, supporting them in areas spanning go-to-market strategies, capital fundraising, and strategic partnerships. Prior to joining Antler, Rohan was at xto10x, Binny Bansal's startup scaling platform, where he led initiatives focused on growth and market strategies. He was one of the founding members at Lynk Global, a SaaS expert network startup, in their India office. Subsequently, he extended the company's reach to North America, establishing offices in New York and Toronto.

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 Associate

Neha is the Marketing Associate 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

Browse our collection of founder stories, industry insights, and latest startup successes from Antler.

View all
Meet the fourth cohort of the Antler India Residency

Read more about the founders that make the largest residency cohort to date in India.

Why Antler is the best place to start your company

As an early team, going from zero to one is the most defining phase of your company building journey. Read on to understand how Antler significantly increases your odds of success.

Investing in IndiaP2P and unlocking capital for 80M women entrepreneurs

IndiaP2P's tech platform ensures the country’s highest-quality borrowers get access to faster, cheaper capital.

How a serial entrepreneur and a tech leader validated a billion dollar insurtech problem

Read how Ankit and Veera arrived at the idea of solving business liability insurance for millions of MSMEs and startups.

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.

How Sangti evolved from a ClimateTech idea to a VC-backed startup

A fitting pairing of Hitesh Bhuraria and Nishant Singh, one that was formed at the first-ever cohort of Antler India Residency, is set to build the future of how companies approach their decarbonization goals.

A doctor's journey and the serendipity of co-founder discovery at Antler Residency

A country of over 1.4 billion people and something as crucial as the medical emergency response system still remains unsolved. The numbers quantify the magnitude and gravity of this problem - over 50% of the ambulances do not arrive even after 60 minutes, 90% of ambulances do not have the basic equipment and 97% have no trained personnel. But here is the most staggering number of them all - over 50% of all deaths in India are preventable. While ambulances are a part of the problem, they are not the solution. The missing piece in creating a robust medical emergency response system is a solid digital infrastructure layer.

Neha Juneja: Closing the credit gap for India’s women entrepreneurs

“India has about 70 million unique women borrowers, which, to put it in context, is about a quarter of our households. Any ease of business here, any ease of credit here, any advancement here is our best shot at becoming a prosperous country.” —Neha Juneja, co-founder and CEO, IndiaP2P

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.

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.

Investing in Cattle Guru to unlock efficiency for 75M dairy farmers in India

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

Investing in OnArrival | Antler India

OnArrival is building simple, plug and play APIs that enable travel sellers (e.g. OTAs, corporate travel managers, travel agents, Airlines, hotels, etc.) bundle high-margin travel ancillaries (e.g. visa, insurance etc) in over a billion trips worldwide.

Investing in Dimension to redefine social building

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

Investing in ApniBus

ApniBus, which has been operating in stealth mode, is now live in more than 350 routes connecting over 1000 destinations. In just 7 months, the platform has seen over 1 million transactions and is growing rapidly month on month. They have perfected an operating playbook that ensures superior unit economics from day 1 and at scale. We are proud to back Sumit, Ravi and the ApniBus team from day zero of their journey transforming intercity travel for the next 400M Bharat travelers.

Investing in Generative AI with Hexo

Generative AI is opening up a world of opportunities and Hexo is building the underlying infrastructure to enable that. We are thrilled to partner with Vignesh Baskaran and Kunal Bhatia to help build and scale Hexo AI.

Investing in Cricinshots and new-gen gaming experiences

We are thrilled to back 21-year-old award-winning game developers and designers, Harsh Savergaonkar and Aditya Kasibhatla, who, with Cricinshots aim to redefine gaming experiences for the next generation of gamers and cricket fans in India and beyond.

Investing in Finverv

We at Antler are thrilled to back Finverv on day zero of its journey of building the critical infrastructure needed for enabling thousands of organizations to offer credit to their customers and suppliers while helping lenders build profitable and scalable partnerships.  

Investing in Adaptive

At Antler India, we are particularly excited to back founders in areas such as SaaS, dev tooling, and Web3 infrastructure—with the vision of building critical infrastructure in India, for the world. To that end, we are thrilled to back Ronak, Debarshi, and the Adaptive team as they embark on a mission to empower technical and non-technical stakeholders at software companies globally.

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.

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.

NEXT100

A first-of-its-kind report in collaboration with over 100 VCs, unicorn founders, technologists and ecosystem leaders, NEXT100 is a compilation of the most compelling problem statements and startup ideas that we, as an ecosystem, think should be pursued.

Some of the contributors include Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), Sriharsha Majety (Swiggy), Aditya Ghosh (Akasa Air), Sudhakar VS (Big Basket), Mayank Kumar (upGrad), Dr. Pramod Varma (FIDE), GV Ravishankar (Peak XV), Harsh Jain (Dream11), Vani Kola (Kalaari Capital), Sanjay Swamy (Prime Ventures), Pratik Poddar (Nexus VP), Sajith Pai (Blume), Dev Khare (Lightspeed), Barath Shankar (Accel), Mridul Arora (Elevation Capital), and Avinash Raghava (SaaSBOOMi).

Build on ONDC

The first and only venture ecosystem focused on ONDC for founders in India, Antler's Build on ONDC platform brings together capital, content and community to help entrepreneurs create businesses and succeed on the open protocol. Created in collaboration with FIDE (Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy) and ONDC.

Explore Build on ONDC

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Terms of Investment

Antler invests INR 2 crores for 9% equity. 

Residency founders receive a one-time grant of INR 1L for solo founders and INR 1.5L for early teams. The grant is given irrespective of whether we invest or not. We do not take any program fees from the founders. 

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