Residency participation is full-time and starts on February 3, 2025. It will run for roughly 10 weeks. This timing is not set as there is potential for you to reach an earlier Investment Committee or roll into the next residency. 

Antler is best experienced in person via our locations in Sydney and Melbourne. This best positions you to find a co-founder, integrate into the residency and Antler more broadly, and enables us to get to know you, therefore we strongly recommend that you spend the first 6 weeks of residency in person.

If you are not located within easy travel of either location, we require you to spend at least 2 weeks in one or a mix of both locations.

To enable comparable experiences for any location and support cross-location co-founding matching, we run most sessions in a hybrid capacity.

Joining Antler gives you access to a vetted talent pool of potential co-founders. However, if you do not find a co-founder in your residency, we encourage you to do your own external search. In this case, we will ask you to introduce them to us and we will conduct an interview. If that goes well, we will send them a Letter of Offer to join you in the current residency.

Another option is that, via an invitation by us, you can join the next Antler residency as a returning founder. We have many examples where we have backed a team who have initially started in separate residencies.

Antler has a strong bias toward co-founding teams,  consisting of 2-3 founders. We do have examples of solo founders in our portfolio but they are few. 

Antler believes in co-founders because:

• As a Day Zero investor, a solo founder represents a significant key person risk to the company
• We back complementary, non-overlapping teams. This means two or three founders who can own functions of the business fitting to their areas of expertise
  • For example tech + domain. This gives the founding team the breadth to execute at pace and clear ownership and decision-making ability
  • It also negates the need to outsource costly areas of the business to increase run-rate
• Founder health is vital and operating as a co-founder teams enables you to spread not just the operational but also emotional load of launching and scaling a company

Antler is business model and industry agnostic. This can be seen via the breadth of our portfolio. 

Globally, Antler has invested in +1,600 companies to date across many industries. In Australia, we have an active portfolio size of >100 companies that is well-balanced across different sectors. We have:

• Enterprise SaaS startups operating in construction site management, cyber security, Talent management, and computer vision
• Digital platforms in verticals such as health, learning, pet services
• Services and D2C in waste management, consumer loyalty, fashion and personalised books
• Fintech and Insurtech startups within SME lending and new insurance products covering a range of industries such as SaaS, FinTech, GreenTech, ConsumerTech

Firstly, you must have full working rights in Australia to be eligible. It is a legal requirement under Australian law to be either an Australian citizen, hold Permanent Residence or a permanent visa to be a Director of a company. 

Outside of that, we look for people with relevant skills to build early-stage businesses - think serial founders, commercial leaders, technical builders, and domain experts - combined with people who demonstrate “Founder DNA”: the grit, drive and tenacity to succeed at all costs.

Still not sure if that's you? Think backgrounds such as:

• Returning founders: Tried and tested founders who have valuable experience through successes and/or failures and are ready to build their next venture
• Business leaders: Commercial pros with strengths in go-to-market, business model building, and securing customers and capital
• Technology and Product leaders: Builders with their hands on in the code base, architecting scalable systems, or setting and executing on the product vision and leading teams
• Subject matter pro’s or functional experts: Those with a specialised skill set that unlocks the idea behind a business usually from professional or academic experience. These individuals have identified an unmet customer need in their field, under utilised technology, or hold Intellectual Property that can be commercialised
• 0 to 1: Seasoned in startups and highly knowledgeable in early-stage through to hypergrowth, these individuals have held defining roles in the growth journey of companies
• Visionaries: Those that have exceptional, unique, and non-conventional backgrounds and see that world a different way, complemented with strong grit and hustle to be successful

The true value of building with Antler comes post-investment as that unlocks our portfolio support consisting of:

• Ability to follow-on from the local fund
  • Antler Australia has deployed additional capital into >80% of our portfolio
  • We aim to follow-on programmatically up to Series A stage
  • We have invested over A$1M into multiple companies over multiple rounds
• A global fund to back companies through their later rounds
  • Antler Elevate has US$280M fund designed to back Antler businesses from Series A-C with average cheque sizes of $3-10M
• Warm introduction to external capital from angels and other institutional investors
• Ongoing business coaching and advisory from our global network
• International scaling support driven through Antler’s on the ground presence in 23 regions
• Introductions to partners, funding sources, key hires
• Antler’s ability to spot synergies and intel from over 700 global transactions to inform coaching
• Perks and partnerships that by the sum of parts now exceed $3M in value
• The Talent Network, Antler’s proprietary platform to connect Antler portfolio companies to vetted job seekers
• Community support via Slack and in-person initiatives