We focus on identifying outlier founders: Nitin Sharma, partner, Antler India

Nitin Sharma,Companion, Antler India

International enterprise capital agency Antler has raised over $300 million to this point. The agency seeks to construct on the success of its regional pre-seed fund mannequin, presently in 15 international locations, and with 350 investments in know-how startups made, now intends to offer continued assist investing as much as Collection C. Earlier this 12 months, Antler introduced a full-fledged launch in India, with the objective of deploying $100 million in India within the subsequent three years. Rajiv Srivatsa and Nitin Sharma, companions at Antler India, co-founded the Antler India Fund, which is able to increase and spend money on early-stage Indian startups. Nitin Sharma just lately spoke to Banasree Purkayastha about Antler’s India plans. Excerpts:

What’s the Antler India Founders Programme? What number of startups have utilized for it and the way does it work?
Antler India began its journey with distinctive cohort-based programmes, which acquired an incredible response, with inbound purposes from practically 5000 startups representing 8000 founders within the final eight months. The format permits founders of their ‘0 to 1’ journey, with a concentrate on cohort-based studying, bespoke assist over the primary 12 months of the founder journey, all alongside a pre-seed funding. We’ve got invested in 13 startups (lower than 0.3% of the practically 5000 startups who utilized). By this funnel, which is amongst the most important and essentially the most selective within the nation, we really feel lucky to get a primary glimpse of the brand new concepts and startups that the following era of Indian founders are aspiring to construct.

We consider that the very best affect for founders on the earliest stage is a mix of neighborhood, community, and shared studying.

What are the sectors that curiosity Antler in India? Are you near finalising any offers?
Whereas Antler India is sector agnostic, we’re fairly enthusiastic about a number of new themes that usually lower throughout standard sectors or areas. These embrace decentralisation, Web3 and the metaverse, new manufacturers, local weather change or wellness. Given Antler’s presence in 15 international locations, we’re particularly effectively fitted to companies “constructing from India, for the world”.

We’ve got just lately introduced our first set of investments in Bookee, Codedamn, Move Membership, Humit and PeakPerformer. We can even be saying our subsequent eight portfolio startups, within the coming months.

What can be the typical measurement of the funding you’re looking at in new investees?
We’re a startup’s first institutional backers. We presently do pre-seed investments within the vary of $200,000 for earliest stage founders, even at an idea or concept stage. Furthermore, we’re a uncommon international institutional fund devoted to this stage in India, and we are able to assist founders by a number of phases within the first 4-5 years of the journey with vital reserve capital for future rounds. As well as, we are able to additionally co-lead or take part in choose later stage investments, with larger cheque sizes.

How do you outline a profitable startup? What’s it in a startup that makes you sit up and take discover?
For our pre-seed investments, we consider startups on the earliest phases— often when the startup is on the idea-stage, or pre-product stage, or pre-traction stage. There are only a few indicators at these phases, which additionally makes early stage investing a lot tougher. We primarily concentrate on figuring out outlier founders—these with the ambition, pace and talent to construct a big enterprise.

Apart from the founders, we consider the dimensions and development of the actual market, and different components corresponding to how a lot worth their product can seize within the value-chain.

We zoom in loads on their distinctive perception or product differentiation angle, and wish to maintain taking larger dangers even when they’re tremendous early on an rising market development, or try to create a brand new person behaviour that has the potential to grow to be huge.