Antler is an on ramp to venture capital and helps you launch your startup from scratch. We surround you with everything you need to build at lightning speed. Learn more at our next AMA - registration & details here.
We look for founders with a proven track record of execution (across a range of academic and professional backgrounds), who are fiercely ambitious, who possess an intense bias towards execution, and who are innately driven to change the world. You must be able to attend our six week phase one Residency in-person in either Austin, Boulder, or New York City. We admit individual founders, people looking for co-founders, and pre-existing teams, but we are entirely focused on the 0 to 1, the earliest stages of team and business building. You can come to us with just an idea - if you're truly ready to sprint forward and build, we'll work with you from day zero.
If you're looking to find a cofounder, validate your business idea, and launch a business, the Antler US Residency is for you.
The next Antler US Residency will be in February 2023 in-person in three US cities: Austin, Boulder, and New York City. We are accepting applications for the Antler US February 2023 Residency; interviews will start in early November 2022.
The next Antler US Residency will be in February 2023 in-person in three US cities: Austin, Boulder, and New York City. We are accepting applications for the Antler US February 2023 Residency; interviews will start in early November 2022.
The Antler US program is divided into two distinct phases. The first phase is our pre-investment, six week Residency. Founders that receive funding from our Investment Committee after our Residency move into phase two, where the focus is entirely on rapid growth and rigorous fundraising preparation.
Join the Antler US Residency to find your cofounder, validate your ideas, and launch your business. Antler is designed so you get the opportunity to build your startup alongside a community of other hand selected, vetted exceptional founders. In your location, there will be an immediate community of around 30 other exceptional, curated founders working alongside you.
The residency is designed to be 75-80% unstructured. We won’t be filling up your calendar with mandatory programming or zoom webinars. Instead, we’re here to support you while your sole focus is on building your company and spending your time however you think best (we typically advise founders to focus on customer validation, market research, and building). From a programming perspective a typical week may include: morning standups, weekly Town Hall, 1-2 workshops and social events, dedicated individual coaching and office hours.
After six weeks of building with us in Residency, you may have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee for pre-seed funding to launch your startup. One pitch, one committee: it's a simple, straightforward process. If you receive funding, we will write you a check for $125,000 via SAFE for 7% of your new company. If you don't receive funding, we will sit down and tell you exactly why—100% transparency.
After passing IC and receiving investment, portfolio companies will engage in a two-month sprint to build and prepare for their next round of fundraising to set themselves up for success.
Antler's Portfolio Showcase gives founders the opportunity to introduce themselves to a highly selective group of pre-seed funds and angel investors.
Here are some of the teams we've backed.
Once you apply, expect to hear back from our scouting team within one week. The full interview process takes around 2-3 weeks to complete.
Once you apply, expect to hear back from our scouting team within one week. The full interview process takes around 2-3 weeks to complete.
Register for our newsletter and join our weekly AMA (Ask Me Anything) to meet the Antler team.
https://antler.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=ca8e71dfc43df42e91b000beb&id=ba43669c7f&f_id=007f25e1f0
Once you apply, expect to hear back from our scouting team within one week. The full interview process takes around 2-3 weeks to complete.
Don't just take it from us. Hear from phenomenal people who joined Antler US to launch their company.
Malcolm-Wiley Floyd
Stairs Financial
Antler’s collection of founders, operators and investors is the strongest platform for an early stage founder on the market.
Jacob Shoihet
Marco Capital
Antler really did accelerate Marco's trajectory: we created a broad network of VC connections and raised a material amount of additional institutional cash. This allows us to make the impact that we want to achieve: we’re building the premier tech-enabled trade finance platform in Latin America. Antler has been an integral partner in powering us forward.
Trisha Goyal
Break the Love
Antler truly understands what it means to be a founder and are truly involved as partners with portfolio companies at the earliest stage.
Manuel Shoenfeld
PowerX
Building a startup with Antler allows you the room to develop, grow or even pivot your business idea, providing you with the guidance you need along the way.
Tyler is a business development specialist and entrepreneur with a strong focus on the growth and geographic expansion of early stage companies. With close to a decade of experience under his belt, Tyler prominently lead the rollout of a comprehensive marketplace business model across over 10 countries in Southeast Asia for both Zalora and Global Fashion Group (GFG). The former Head of Business Development at GFG also spearheaded one of the largest private e-commerce acquisitions to-date involving India’s e-commerce fashion site, Jabong.
Jeff is a sales leader and investor. Over a nine year run at LinkedIn, Jeff held a series of roles launching new business units and leading sales teams to best-in-company performances as the business grew to 770 million members and $10B in revenue. Separately, Jeff launched his own company, Earhoox, scaling it across the globe. He is also an active angel investor focused on health, wealth, and happiness. Before coming to Antler, he was a General Partner at Forum Ventures, focused on early stage B2B SaaS.
Navi is Global Partner at Antler in New York and Head of Technology at the Antler U.S. fund where he guides Antler startups and holds several board positions. Previously, Navi was a deeptech focused researcher at MIT and Entrepreneur in Residence at TandemLaunch, an aspiring startup foundry and seed fund in North America. As a former co-founder of a MIT-backed startup that invented and commercialized novel imaging technology, Navi has experienced all facets of the tech startup journey. He is a Web3 enthusiast and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Sciences from University of St. Andrews in the UK.
Lisa joins Antler with over 16 years of experience in Venture Capital. Before Antler, Lisa was the CFO of Tribe Capital. Prior to Tribe, Lisa served as VP of Finance for Khosla Ventures and as the part-time CFO for several smaller firms including Asset Management Ventures & Prospect Ventures. She started her career at Morgenthaler, based in Cleveland, Ohio.
Charlie Hayley Bell (Associate Partner) leads Capital and Investor Relations for Antler US. Charlie has 20 years of alternative investment experience in the US, and Latin America across both public and private markets advising investors and raising capital for hedge funds, real estate, PE, and venture capital. Charlie is an investor in early and growth stage technology and CPG companies. He previously was with HSBC, Archstone Partners, and Old City Securities. He holds a MA from Edinburgh University.
Ryan is an entrepreneur and business development professional that has built and scaled ventures in the financial services, apparel, technology, and food/beverage spaces. For the past few years, he has focused on simultaneously growing a financial services start-up and a nonprofit organization that provides pro-bono services to empower lower-income entrepreneurs. He brings experience spanning the start-up ecosystem to Antler's founders where he will be focused on building Antler in the US.
Prerna is the recruiting director at Antler and oversees founder recruiting efforts globally. She was an early employee at Uber Asia, where she hired hundreds of high performing individuals to help scale Uber’s growth in the region. After Uber, Prerna successfully laid the entire framework for the HR & Recruitment function of Flow Traders Asia (Singapore & Hong Kong), a leading Dutch proprietary trading firm, specialising in ETFs.
Roslyn is a strategy and business development specialist with a background in hypergrowth sales, financial markets, and international policy. Prior to Antler, she helped launch the enterprise segment at WeWork and partnered with financial services accounts to develop custom innovation solutions. Previously, she held positions in structured derivatives at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and U.S.-China trade policy at the Executive Office of the President. Roslyn holds a BA from Cornell University and is pursuing a part-time MBA at NYU Stern, specializing in strategy and product management.
Caroline is a marketing and business operations professional with a background in finance, recruitment, and content creation. Prior to joining Antler, Caroline was an associate producer and operations associate at NationSwell, a social impact company based in New York. Working in social impact production allowed Caroline to tell important stories about innovators driving forward-looking solutions across the US. Caroline is excited to play a greater role in advancing those solutions by empowering founders at Antler.
Caroline graduated Cum Laude from the University of San Diego, where she obtained her BBA in Finance and Business Economics.
Rio is the Director of the Boulder program and residency. Prior to Antler, Rio was focused on growth strategy and innovation at frog where he was a Senior Strategist, shaping ideas into commercially viable products and services. Previously, Rio had experience in both growth equity and early-stage VC. He is now developing Antler’s footprint in the Rocky Mountain Region, hoping to grow the Boulder/Denver startup ecosystem.
Joe joins Antler with a background in sales and business development. Throughout his career, he’s had the privilege of cultivating and managing relationships with the world's largest organizations in an effort to support their key strategic initiatives at hyper-growth companies like Forter and Okta.
Annie is an investor focused on identifying founders at the early stages across a multitude of verticals including business and consumer technology and CPG. After graduating in 2019, Annie spent time in growth equity at Spring Lake Equity Partners where she focused on sourcing growth stage private technology businesses. Prior to Antler, Annie was an investor at BBG Ventures investing in seed stage women founded businesses.
Sam is a management professional with over 7 years progressive experience in customer experience, operations, team building and project management for the hospitality industry. She joins us from WeWork where she was a Community Lead. Prior to WeWork, Sam worked for the Four Seasons Hotels as a Guest Experience & Operations Manager.
Lessons learned from the world's best founders and VCs
The Early Days podcast launched in June, unwrapping how world-class founders built today’s most influential companies. Antler’s Tyler Norwood, creator and host of the podcast, talks about what inspired it, why the early days are so crucial, and why it’s important to humanize startups.
Mark Gainey, co-founder and chairman of Strava, shares the story of how he built the world's largest online athlete community.
Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman, shares how he first came up with this idea, and how he has successfully competed with one of the world's most powerful companies, Google.
Andrew Ofstad, co-founder of the world's largest no-code platform Airtable, shares how three friends from college built an $11 billion dollar no-code empire that more than 80% of the Fortune 100 uses day-to-day.
Avi Meir, founder and CEO of TravelPerk, shares his story of becoming a serial entrepreneur, and how his latest venture TravelPerk is changing the game in corporate travel.
Harpaul Sambhi dives into how he built Magical, a company focused on reducing monotony and pain in everyday tasks through simple, effective automation. At the time of recording, Magical had just raised $41 million in funding and automated over one billion tasks for more than 10,000 companies globally.
Sacha Michaud, co-founder of Glovo, shares the story of how this once humble delivery company grew into a billion-dollar logistics platform in Europe.
Jake Gibson, co-founder of Nerdwallet, shares the story of how messing around with a friend to fix a problem getting a credit card scaled into a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ.
Fredrik Thomassen is the founder and CEO of Superside, a fully distributed and remote design operations platform. Fredrik explains how he and his co-founder got Superside off the ground by manually hacking together an MVP without any tech or teammates who knew how to code. We also hear Fredrik's insights on prioritizing his scope of product offerings, fundraising, and running a truly global company.
Did you know that nearly 45 million Americans don't have a credit score, and most are immigrant families that struggle with lack of access to basic financial services because of this? In Episode 9 of the Early Days, Samir Goel shares how watching his parents struggle with lack of access to basic financial services inspired him to build Esusu.
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In Episode 10 of the Early Days, Scott tells the story of his 16-year journey building charity:water with the mission to give people access to clean water.
You can apply to our Residency if you hold any type of valid US work visa.
We are focused on providing founders better access to capital at the very beginning of their journey, so we back founders where we can be the first investor in. We'll invest as early as a clearly defined product statement and roadmap to your MVP, we'll even help you incorporate your new venture if necessary.
We are industry agnostic and invest across all technology sectors.
Applications for our February 2023 cohort will close in mid-January or when we fill our February 2023 cohort in each location. We highly encourage you to invite stellar fellow founders in your network to apply to Antler!
The Antler residency is a full-time commitment. This means that you are 100% dedicating your time to building your company. That said, it is not “mandatory” to be in the office from 9-5PM daily. The intention is to foster an engaged and supportive community of founders building together in person. As long as you show up for your fellow cohort and give and receive value from the community, you can spend your time in any way you see most fit to build your company. Most founders come in 4-5 days a week.
We do not provide a stipend or relocation support for the residency. If you are joining us from out of town, check out Relocation Resources.
Yes, co-founders are welcome, though we only require 1 founder to be dedicated full-time in the residency. While we do not guarantee co-founder matching during the residency, you are encouraged to meet and potentially team up with other residents, bring in folks from your network to work in the office, or canvas the Antler network for potential co-founder fits. This cohort, we will have around 30 founders joining us per location.
Not every founder or team will receive the opportunity to present to the investment committee (IC) during Pitch Week. This happens for a variety of reasons, including: dropping out for personal reasons or time commitment issues, pivoting your idea and requiring more time to validate, not demonstrating sufficient traction to put your best foot forward yet, deciding to join another founder or team, or deciding that your business is not venture scalable, amongst other reasons. If it is the case that you do not present to the Antler IC at this point in time, we will work with you on an individual basis to explore other options, such as joining our Talent Network, setting goals and a timeline for a delayed IC pitch, etc.
We do not have a minimum or maximum number of investments per cohort or location, though it is unlikely that we invest in 100% or 0% of founders in the residency. Historically, we have invested in 20-45% of founders in each residency. We generally make our decisions based on founder strength in domain expertise, deep understanding of the problem statement and your customer, first principled thinking and vision, execution ability, and progress made over the period of time.
We would never force anyone to take our money 🙂 Technically, the Memorandum of Understanding (part of your DocuSign package) is an expectation-setting legal document. We expect teams to honor the spirit of the agreement as we do. The intent is that over the six weeks, we will earn our equity, and you will see the value of having the Antler team on your cap table and as an active advisor for continued future support as an extension of your founding team.
If you successfully pitch to the investment committee, you will become part of the Antler portfolio and kick off Phase II. You will be assigned a deal lead to work closely with going forward, and go through a transition week where we will support you on incorporation, documentation, admin, and other items in order to receive the funding, clarify goals and milestones, and set you up on the path to scale and raise your seed.
If you are unsuccessful in pitching to the investment committee, you will still remain a valuable part of the Antler community for life. You will retain access to office space for an additional week, remain in our Slack community and other platforms, and can meet with our team to discuss next steps for your startup. Previous residents have taken on feedback and returned to pitch successfully, joined Antler portfolio companies or the talent network, or started new companies and returned to Antler. The door is always open 🔑
Get in touch with our team!
