Antler Launches Venture Platform For Founders Building On ONDC

Venture capital firm Antler India launched an Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)-focussed venture platform, Antler ONDC, on Wednesday (August 9). The platform aims to provide resources, an expert network, community and capital to founders building on ONDC.

As shared by the Singapore-based VC firm, the platform will offer pre-seed capital of $300K, along with an additional investment of up to $200K, to the teams that have workable ideas.

Meanwhile, it will also assist pre-team and pre-idea founders to build on ONDC.

The Antler India Residency, which helps aspiring entrepreneurs find cofounders and raise funding in a span of three months, will also help select founders building on ONDC to scale up.

“As the first VCs to launch a platform to increase talent density and enable opportunities on ONDC, we are excited to partner with Nandan Nilekani, and the FIDE, ONDC leadership. We are excited to see founders building at population scale in themes like complex commerce, vernacular commerce and flow-based lending, to name a few,” Nitin Sharma, a partner at Antler in India, said.

The Antler ONDC platform has been created in collaboration with FIDE (Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy) and Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani.

“We are going to democratise ecommerce in India and it won’t be limited to a few players. Everyone, every supplier, including kirana stores, grocery retailers, electronics retailers, small vendors, and restaurants, should participate in the digital marketplace on an open platform,” Nilekani said.

Recently, the ONDC rails infrastructure startup Plotch.ai secured funding in a pre-seed round led by Antler India. The startup plans to use the funds to improve its ONDC product suite as a Technology Services Provider (TSP) in the emerging ONDC ecosystem.

ONDC is currently live in B2C and B2B retail, logistics and mobility space across more than 250 cities, with more than 50,000 transactions per day across these domains. It has claimed to clock over 1 lakh daily transactions across use cases like grocery and mobility.

Moreover, Namma Yatri, the mobility app on ONDC has onboarded over 16 lakh users and 85K auto drivers since its launch.

ONDC recently released draft specifications for the flow of buying and selling financial services on the network, while it is seeking feedback from banks, NBFCs, and buyer and seller apps for the design of the protocol for buying financial products and services, including gift cards, personal loans and invoice-based credit.