Beyond Numbers: Antler India's Founder First Approach to Startup Investing In an age driven by numbers and statistics, and where startups grind each day to pick up momentum before their potential ticket to funding, Antler India is one of those venture capital firms that firmly believes the investment premise can be psychological as much as it is numerical.
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In an age driven by numbers and statistics, and where startups grind each day to pick up momentum before their potential ticket to funding, Antler India is one of those venture capital firms that firmly believes the investment premise can be psychological as much as it is numerical.
Antler has a knack for recognizing startups at very early stages, referred to as 'Day Zero Investing', Nitin Sharma, Co-founder and Partner, Antler in India told Entrepreneur India.
Sharma says that the very first steps of a founder's journey are "exciting" as they involve ideating and elements like the team, the founders, the idea, the business plan, and the product are not final.
"And that's a very, very interesting, chaotic, creative process. So that is the core of where we start. Our mission statement is from day zero to greatness. We want to be there and then partner with these founders as they build a company all the way to IPOs."
The second aspect of Antler's thesis is a global network and a strong presence in over 30 prominent tech ecosystems so that founders get access to a worldwide network, regardless of the stage they are at.
"Because no matter what you're building and where, you will immediately be working in this vast network of 350 Antler people and more than 1,000 portfolio startups from all across the world," says Sharma.
Sharma believes that the result of focusing on ideas and startups from day zero is that the firm invests in personalities rather than just business ideas or the business itself.
"That is the asset you're investing in. Everything else will change and pivot like the initial idea or even the product may not be the same two years later. But the core asset is the person you're backing remains the same," he says.
Sharma explained that Antler goes deep into founder psychology and that it is as much an art as a science. The firm looks into the analytical numbers of course, such as market size, and trends but the primary bet is on the person.
Antler's residency program in Bengaluru has so far attracted 50,000 applications after kicking off three and a half years ago. As one of the largest pre-seed funds in the country, the firm has kept aside INR 600 crore (USD75 million) dedicated to day zero investing.
Sharma says that the uncovering founder's psychology is highly nuanced, involving the ability to take a lot of pain and never give up, the ambition and inner motivation to reach for extremely big outcomes, the ability to get an insane amount done in very short time and having the intellectual aptitude to get to the right answer quicker than others.
"We go into how obsessive they are. How much attention to detail they put around understanding their customer. How ambitious and how well have they taken failure in the past…because entrepreneurship is nothing but just failure after failure every day."
Sometimes it is about taking a leap of faith for Antler where the firm showed more confidence in the founders than their actual product. Sharma takes the example of Ankit Acharya and Pranjal Nadhani, founders of Cautio, a dashcam startup.
Sharma explains that it was an interesting idea because the problem with road safety exists. More dashcams will help but if one starts thinking about the market size, brand building, and complications in the hardware business; all while trying to go against Chinese competition, it becomes a little challenging.
"But then in the residency you start to work with them. And we realize the potential together. Their execution speed was unbelievable and so was the amount of new things happening for the company like customers and employees. So we saw founders who were so driven, day in day out solving problems and creating this business and ended up discovering video telematics which could be very useful for self-driven cars of the future," adds Sharma.
"Sometimes betting on the founder can lead you to learn about the market in a completely new perspective."
