Unpacking Antler India’s Pre-Seed Investment Thesis For ‘Bold Founders’

For many early stage investors in India, 2024 was a post-correction year, but even then seed funding saw a 31% YoY increase compared to 2023. And 2025 is the year for big, bold bets, believes Antler India partner Nitin Sharma

“I would love to see more founders who are thinking more boldly, and even if it means that their product needs to involve hardware, deeptech, robotics. All of this used to be very difficult even five years ago, but the ecosystem has changed, and we have the chance now,” Antler India’s Sharma told Inc42.

Hundreds of early-stage funds and investors are competing for these new-age innovators. Having invested in 85+ startups since inception, Antler has backed founders on the cutting-edge of tech.

In 2024, Antler invested in 40 startups, many of which were developed in Antler’s Residency, “where founders have the opportunity to validate their ideas, build strong teams, and get early customer traction before raising their first round,” Sharma added.

Most recently, Antler’s portfolio has grown to include the likes of fashion retail marketplace Bizup, AI-powered mobility hardware startup Cautio and ready to cook staples brand Freshcon. Besides this, the fund has backed the likes of aluminium-air fuel cell startup Meine Electric, and solar energy platform Sustvest. For Sharma, these startups represent the next big wave of innovation coming from the maturing deeptech sector.

Seed stage startups raised $893 Mn during the year, however, fewer deals were recorded at this stage during the year. Inc42 data reveals that the average ticket size of seed stage funding witnessed a 25% spike in the year gone by. This shows the growing appetite for early stage bets among investors such as Antler.

Sector-wise, seed-stage enterprise tech startups were favourite picks for early stage investors, and here, there’s a big change coming with the AI revolution disrupting the best laid plans of SaaS giants.

In the four years since the launch of the India operations, Antler India has crossed 64,000 applications, Sharma told Inc42.

He claims this is one of the largest funnels for early institutional funds, and Antler has boiled it down to 85 investments thus far. “We are blessed to have more than 150 LPs including more than 10 institutions from both India and abroad, and this is now the largest first fund within Antler overall globally.”

In 2025, the firm plans to invest in around 40 startups, taking its portfolio to over 100 startups and with early stage AI booming in India, naturally Sharma is bullish about where Indian founders can take this wave.

At the same time, the Antler India partner feels that Indian founders have not yet gone deeper into AI workflows and there is a gap, which can be filled once entrepreneurs start capitalising on products in the AI economy for sectors such as travel, productivity, healthcare and education.

Edited excerpts…

Inc42: I think we can start from the point before joining Antler India and leading India investments at the firm. What was your journey like till that point? 

Nitin Sharma: So I have been in the venture capital career now for 15 years. I started in the US at a very large global fund  And after that had a second stint in investing as part of the founding team of Lightbox Ventures in India.

My third stint was starting a micro VC fund of my own called First Principles, where we did about 40 investments including some of the first in the web3 space in India.

So for me, Antler is a continuation of the journey, rather than a big transition. I always describe myself as a more sort of entrepreneurial investor, someone who has invested at earlier and earlier stages as I have evolved.

Starting from the top at the 10 to 100 stage and all the way now to what is -1 to 0, because now we are working with founders at the very early stages of inception.

Inc42: But what exactly led you to Antler in particular? 

Nitin Sharma: I get asked that question often. So  I really enjoyed the solo GP journey and had multiple successes being the first cheque in companies like Mudrex, Third Wave Coffee, Juno and others.  I think while that gave me a lot of joy, I realised I wanted to build something more institutional and I really tried to look at two things, right?

What is the gap in the ecosystem and what is the different strategy in investing rather than doing sort of these very early stage syndicates and angel checks.

I felt that the ecosystem needed a platform and that platform would be something that not just invests a check but also works to help founders get started by solving problems such as validating an idea or finding a cofounder or going global.

Plus, if you have an institutional platform that helps solve problems at scale, then the investment returns would also be phenomenal and the Antler structure is very interesting. Because we act as owners of the local business, the vast majority of decisions for the Indian market are taken at the local level.

Rajiv and I are basically building a fund ourselves, but we are also getting the best of both worlds because we have the global brand of Antler, and we get to access those massive capital relationships. Antler has just crossed $1 Bn in just six years which is unheard of. We have 20 different sovereign funds all over the world supporting Antler.

The power of the network is tremendous

Inc42: How do you set yourself apart from that? 

Nitin Sharma: My north star has been how do you go to founders and  If you provide the maximum value, everything else will take care of itself. Because the best founders will want to work with you.

So I think when we work with founders in India, we are not only solving real problems through residencies, we are enabling the scale of having hundreds of people start new companies and we are also plugging them into the fastest growing early stage platform in the world. So there is so much value that a founder can get in 30 countries with Antler’s 30 offices whether it’s capital, talent advice or more.

So instead of just building a fund, which is a solo person’s operation, we are building an institutional platform. That idea appealed to me a lot.

Inc42: You said that only one in thousand of the applications get invested. Do you have any specific framework which you use to analyze the companies? 

Nitin Sharma: I would say that our philosophy is that at the stage where we invest typically it is primarily about the founder because I have seen in my own 15-year investing career that the most important investing decision at this stage is not the market, it’s not the idea, it’s not the  product, it’s the founder

Trends, products, business plans can all change, pivot and disappear. But the founder remains,  So the most important thing is to understand their psychology and the qualities that could make them  a great founder.

Their reason for being a founder is also important: Why are they building that business? At Antler, we have a framework called AGOATX — ambition, grit, obsession, agency, thinking clarity and an X factor.

So every founder that we work with in our residencies or even when we work with them fast track as a team, we pay a lot of attention to understanding them and their psychology, their working style, their aggressiveness, their speed. Ultimately they have to be people who can withstand failure again and again.

Sometimes, I think VCs make the mistake of overthinking things like TAM and product roadmaps and all that, which is important but ultimately if you get the founder wrong then nothing is important.

Of course, we also have our own internal thesis on which markets are interesting. We obviously have a lot of experience in investing and operating.  So we bring the market knowledge and diligence to bear as well but I would say primarily the focus is how strongly do we feel about someone’s potential as a founder.

Inc42: You said VCs often overthink TAM etc, but having a sector focus helps sharpen focus for many investors. What’s the primary focus in Antler’s case?

Nitin Sharma: I don’t like overthinking this sector question, because people can give you some answers but I don’t think that even the smartest investor has a clue about which sector will be the next big thing.

Things are changing so quickly right now, so we don’t start with sector targets or anything like that.  We start with some broad thesis about the future. So for example, the next wave of India fintech and DPI is very interesting.

We think that obviously Aadhaar and UPI etc have played out, but Account Aggregator and all of these are still very nascent, and the potential is massive. SaaS will actually become more interesting — people have assumed that SaaS in India is a small market but that’s not true.

Obviously the biggest thing that everybody is working on right now is GenAI. We believe that we are looking for certainly, and much more activity on the consumer AI front, because the first wave of wrappers and copilots has sort of come and gone.

Inc42: You brought up AI, so we have to talk about that. How is your thesis evolving for AI and GenAI?

Nitin Sharma: See, with AI, you can completely reimagine things. So I’ve been doing some work on that.

The biggest challenge, of course, as an ecosystem is that most of the value that is getting captured right now is at the infra layer or the model layer. And in India we don’t have much activity on that front right so I’m sure you’ve been following everything from DeepSeek to Open AI to the massive growth of Nvidia and so on.

The key question for us is where value is being captured across the infra, compute, and model layers. Right now, India isn’t a major player in these areas, but that’s understandable given the context. Most Indian startups are focused on the application and services layer, which actually presents more opportunities for innovation and growth.

But I think there is obviously number one, we have a $250 Bn IT services industry. So how does that adapt to AI and what new AI services companies can come up?

Inc42: SaaS is struggling to adapt in some ways right? Where do you see this going? 

Nitin Sharma: SaaS is now changing from software as a service to outcome as a service. So the number one question for founders is what are the new things around the services industry. The second biggest challenge I feel is that our founders are not being imaginative enough right now. I think we will probably hopefully see more of this in 2025 but the real interesting things around AI is in my opinion how do you reimagine rather than just incrementally make something better.

I think you have the ability to even do consumer AI hardware in India. We’ve seen Ultrahuman’s numbers, for instance. There is so much that Indian founders can build around consumer AI for healthcare, education, productivity, travel and more.

The third thing I would say is that within SaaS, one of the challenges would be that earlier software development had a major human component. So there was an India advantage or companies could compete at lower cost right or have higher margins.

But in the age of GenAI, where AI is coding, you don’t need people to write software, so Indian companies will have to adapt. You really have to become good at reimagining the workflows and solving for real outcomes otherwise they will be competing with someone in the Bay Area who could develop a vertical SaaS company.

For someone building in Chennai, for example, it was much cheaper to develop SaaS applications but with AI that gap will be narrowed. So how do Indian companies compete beyond the cost advantage? This is going to become a very important question.

Finally of course, there is the question of how quickly we can have an ecosystem for Indian language SaaS applications, because right now we are not seeing much activity there, but that would be really interesting.

Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam