Antler Launches Criticality: $65M Fund to Back Transformative Technologies

San Francisco, CA / Albuquerque, NM, July 29, 2025: Criticality debuts with a focus on investing in transformative technologies at the Seed and Series A stages. The fund is designed to partner with founders building breakthrough solutions in deep tech and underserved sectors. 

Criticality is grounded in the belief that the next generation of durable, category-defining companies will emerge where technical complexity intersects with real-world urgency. As traditional venture capital increasingly orients toward software efficiencies and short-term momentum, Criticality is intentionally focused on harder, longer-horizon bets that have the potential to reset how core systems operate. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation.

The fund is anchored by the New Mexico State Investment Council (NMSIC) and structured to optimize for both return-driven capital deployment and long-term economic impact. While independently managed, Criticality reflects a next-generation approach to public-private alignment—prioritizing strong financial outcomes while enabling institutional capital to support innovation that strengthens national resilience, regional development, and global competitiveness.

“The most valuable companies of the next decade will emerge at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency,” said Ryan Sommerville, General Partner at Criticality. “We launched this fund to identify and support those teams early—founders working on foundational infrastructure, overlooked systems, and technologies that can shift entire industries. Criticality exists to help them scale with conviction and strategic alignment from day one.”

Criticality builds on the foundational work of Antler’s platform and reflects the firm’s conviction-driven approach to early-stage venture investing. The new fund complements Antler’s U.S. pre-seed model by investing from Seed through Series A, extending support beyond company formation to help founders scale with deep technical and strategic backing The fund’s model allows it to move quickly with early-stage founders, while bringing in capital partners and downstream support designed for technical rigor and institutional scale. The fund complements Antler’s U.S. pre-seed platform. By extending capital into later-stage opportunities, Criticality creates a capital supply chain that allows promising founders to continue scaling.

The fund is now fully closed and actively deploying capital, with portfolio companies building in AI applications to drug discovery and clinical trials, modular housing, and value-based healthcare.

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ABOUT ANTLER

Founded in Singapore in 2018 by Magnus Grimeland and a team of successful entrepreneurs and investors, Antler is the most active early-stage venture capital firm worldwide. Antler leads in "Day Zero" investing, an approach to venture capital focused on partnering with founders pre-launch. Antler systematically removes capital and network constraints for early-stage technology entrepreneurs by providing co-founder matching, deep business model validation, initial capital, expansion support, and follow-on funding. The firm is present in 27 cities across most leading technology ecosystems worldwide. It has made over 1,500 investments into early-stage startups, such as Airalo and Lovable. Antler has been repeatedly recognized by Pitchbook as the world’s most active angel and seed-stage investor.

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CONTACT

Rike Döpp Bergérus , Vice President, Global PR and Communications
rike@antler.co, +46 706 31 35 38 WhatsApp