Antler India Announces First Set Of Pre-Seed Investments Earlier this year, Antler launched in India with the goal of deploying $100 million in the country over the next 3 years
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Antler India recently announced its first set of investments in Peak Performer, Codedamn, Bookee, Flow Club, and Humit. The firm will announce the remaining investments over the next few months. The overall portfolio includes 31 per cent female founders, 30 per cent GenZ founders, and 39 per cent repeat founders, with more than half of the portfolio-building for the global market. Additionally, 70 per cent of the startups are in the idea, prototype and pre-traction stages.
"The 13 portfolio startups were selected from nearly 5000 startups representing 8000 founders - making the funnel amongst the largest and the most selective in the country, at an acceptance rate of less than 0.3 per cent. Additionally, the large volumes of inbound applications to the fund means that we see more than two-thirds of all startups in the idea or pre-traction phase in India - this places us in a unique position of getting the first glimpse into new ideas and startups the next generation of Indian founders are aspiring to build," said Rajiv Srivatsa, partner, Antler India.
Antler India is an institutional pre-seed fund in India, investing in the first 12 months of the founder journey while supporting portfolio companies with significant follow-on funding and platform support. In its first 8 months, Antler India has invested in more than a dozen early-stage startups for investments across diverse sectors such as fintech, SaaS, edtech, e-commerce, D2C, HRtech, and more. Earlier this year, Antler launched in India with the goal of deploying $100 million in the country over the next 3 years.
"As India's seed and early-stage ecosystem matures, it's time for an institutional platform at the pre-seed stage to help founders build global-ready unicorns. While Antler India is sector agnostic, we are quite passionate about several new and emerging themes that often cut across conventional sectors or spaces. These include decentralization, Web3, and the metaverse, new brands, climate change, and wellness among others. Most startups in these spaces will be global from Day 1 - and given our expertise and global platform-approach spanning investors, talent pool, and domain experts in 15 countries, we are especially well suited for early-stage startups in these future-forward verticals," added Nitin Sharma, partner, Antler India.
