Antler raises US$50M from investors including Facebook co-founder to expand into new locations

Antler, a global startup generator and early-stage venture capital firm, today announced that it has raised additional US$50 million for its funds in Amsterdam, London, New York, Stockholm, Oslo, Sydney, Nairobi and Singapore.

Amongst the new investors are Facebook Co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Elaine Saverin, investor and philanthropist Christen Sveeas (through Kistefos), Canica International, and Japanese financial services company Credit Saison, amongst other independent investors, entrepreneurs and finance industry leaders.

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Magnus Grimeland, CEO and Founder of Antler, said: “Raising funds across seven geographies means that we can spread our impact across the world. We are looking forward to seeing our existing portfolio of exciting startups expand and launching further Antler programmes in 2020.”

Founded in Singapore in 2017 by Grimeland, who earlier co-founded Zalora, Antler identifies and enables exceptional people to build groundbreaking tech companies — regardless of gender, socioeconomic background or ethnicity — from the ground up through its programme.

Antler then provides pre-seed and later-stage capital to successful companies. In order to provide this funding, it has local funds in each geography.

Antler invests US$100,000-200,000 into select teams.

Since its launch in Singapore in 2018, it has invested in over 120 companies. The portfolio is diverse, with companies in 17 industries, founders from 36 nationalities and 52 per cent of companies having at least one female co-founder. Its portfolio firms Airalo and Cognicept have both raised investment from Sequoia, Sampingan from Golden Gate Ventures. Base, another Antler startup, secured money from East Ventures.

Antler already runs programmes in eight global locations and will soon launch in Jakarta and other locations globally in 2020.

“More than half of Antler’s portfolio companies have at least one female founder, which is above the industry average. We need to champion and back female leaders as an industry, and it’s great to see Antler doing its bit,” said Elaine Saverin.

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In November, Antler announced a partnership with National University of Singapore (NUS) via its Graduate Research Innovation Programme to launch an executive programme to enable more entrepreneurs to build successful deeptech startups.

 

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