Himank Amar

95,000+ applications and conversations. A tiny fraction get funded. A handful make it to Antler Showcase. Past founders in this room: 🛡️ Armory — Anduril of India. ₹100Cr MoD order, ₹35Cr raised (GrowX, Antler, Industrial47) 🏠 HouseEazy — ₹150Cr Series B (Accel, Chiratae, Antler), 2,500+ homes transacted 🎙️ Navana.ai — Voice AI, live at Bajaj Finserv, backed by Ronnie Screwvala 🤖 Dodge AI — Google-Accel Atoms cohort, AI Futures Fund, Fortune 100 customers 🚗 MiloDrive — 1M+ EV rides, $2.4M raised 🛰️ InspeCity — India's first in-orbit satellite servicing our boldest best in space-tech, $7.2M+ raised 🏦 Mysa — Live with Yes Bank, $3.4M (Blume, Antler) 😴 Dusq — Shark Tank India, fastest Indian startup to hit $1M on Kickstarter 🏪 Tradeface — Building India's hyperlocal B2B supply chain 80% of Showcase alums go on to raise from top funds. You get to meet 9 founders backed early by Antler on 21st July. If you're an investor, excited about catching a glimpse of the future, register below. 🔗 Virtual Showcase: luma.com/ry0eocl3 🔗 KOKO Mixer (Bengaluru): luma.com/78cp0f1f

𝗙𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗶𝘁 $𝟭𝗠 𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗸𝗶𝗰𝗸𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿. 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿. Surpassed Ultrahuman's Ring (500K) too. Legends. Another India to US story accelerated by @AntlerGlobal 𝗘𝗺𝗯𝗮𝗿𝗸. Building for the US? Email me :)

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Electric mobility startup Milo Drive raises $2.4 Mn in seed funding 💰👇 Milo Drive has raised $2.4 Mn (about ₹22.9 Cr) in a seed funding round co-led by Caret Capital and Antler, with participation from Alteria Capital, India Angel Network (IAN) Capital, Climate Angels, Aureolis Capital and other investors. The startup will use the fresh capital to strengthen its multi-channel demand network, expand its fleet operator base, enhance its charging intelligence capabilities, and scale its technology platform. Founded in 2024, Milo Drive operates a tech platform for electric cab drivers and small fleet owners. The startup claims to have facilitated more than 1 Mn rides to date. 🔗 Read the article in detail here: 4-2.co/4bas26k #news #startup #funding #MiloDrive #Inc42

Retail is detail. We spent a day in Mandya (population ~300k) with the stellar BazaarNow team - in their dark stores and the master hub, and doing real deliveries to customers. For me, by far, the best part about doing Day Zero (first cheque) investing is partnering with teams of underdogs who set a new benchmark for customer obsession, and sheer speed of learning and execution. This is one of those teams; they are figuring things out so quickly that it’s just hard to keep up. Loved seeing the third and fourth level of detail (assortment, buying journey all the way to how picking and delivery is done) they have gone to to create customer delight and be extra frugal at the same time - important to make economics work in these new markets. Great for our @AntlerIndia team to see how they are scaling to thousands of orders per day, bringing a new retail channel to a vast aspirational section of the country. It’s high time that a new large player catered to retail commerce for the real India beyond the metros, but it must start with a very specific DNA. I believe this is that team. And yes, we learnt about tons of sizeable, much-loved, local brands that you never see in metro cities! @HimankAmar @SirCribs_a_Lot @mkt_not @telljeeves @raghavgoyal97 @jasnoorgill @abhishek_mohan @anshuprasher

we set up 1,000+ couples over the last few months, and the biggest thing we learned is finding the match is just 10% of the job. the other 90% is everything after. is he actually interested or just being nice. am i being too picky or is this an actual dealbreaker. what was that weird feeling after the date i can't explain. the things you text three friends to get an answer. nobody built for that part. so wave became that person. wave helps you find someone, then actually stays. she helps you reflect, get clarity, and work through the messy 90% no one talks about. we were never meant to do this part alone. wave is live today. link in comments.

Past 30 days in my life: SF —> NY —> Berlin —> Mandya (thanks to BazaarNow) 😂 One would say Mandya is less exciting than the rest. But with Priyanshu and the rest of the BazaarNow team, it’s probably the most exciting place to be in retail. @HimankAmar @nitinsharma1

🚀 BazaarNow: Watch out for this company Knew in about 15 minutes that we had to be the first backer of Priyanshu Jain. Who I consider to be one of the true outliers, one of the more obsessive, first-principles thinking founders I have seen in my 15 years in venture. We led the pre-seed just a few months back. Met on a Sunday, hours after we first got introduced. Within a few months, Arjun, Tarithmay & Priyanshu have cracked something crazy: New habit creation + very promising economics + insane speed of execution The problem they are addressing has an unbounded ceiling (if the team DNA is right) - a new retail channel for daily commerce Consumers in Tier 1 urban India have experienced many retail formats: kiranas, big basket organized retail, specialist retail, e-commerce formats, and now quick commerce. But go 50-100 kms out of any major city, to the real vastness of India (smaller cities) - and they haven’t really been given new retail experiences for daily needs, beyond a kirana. Each of these is a growing economy yearning for the right combination of price, convenience and variety. This is a non-trivial problem to solve market by market… Glad to be partnering with our friends @anshuprasher @sandeepmtandon @wb_capital at pre-seed and now @abhishek_mohan @peakxvpartners @sjs_day1 + stellar angel investors including @viditaatrey (@Meesho_Official), @prashantsachan (@AppsForBharat), @Salujanitin (@Chaayos), Siddharth Gadia (@zeno_health) and Ayyappan R (@FirstClubIndia). @AntlerIndia @AntlerGlobal @HimankAmar @mkt_not @telljeeves @GowriShankarNag @Bhavnasuresh @SirCribs_a_Lot Thx @Goyal4Gagan for the kind connection

$1.5 Trillion Do you have friends who work for int'l tech giants and get ESOP / RSUs / any form of equity compensation? With gigantic tech IPOs on the horizon, it's another good week to realize there's $1.5 Trillion sitting in equity compensation globally! However, international employees are at a structural disadvantage and lose significant value when trying to manage or diversify this earned wealth. How do you build the best experience for them to safely transfer and allocate their assets? Shivang and Arnav are building something cool to help them, and we're excited about being their first backer. Check out rovia.one @HimankAmar @mkt_not @soumitra_sharma @a1purva @AntlerIndia

Google’s tech. Antler’s operator DNA. Built for scale 🚀📈 Google for Startups Immersion, powered by @AntlerIndia, is a two-phase program for founders moving from MVP to a defensible, AI-first product. Applications close May 22. Apply now: goo.gle/4wudTtU

Move Beyond the Wrapper: Build a Defensible AI Core.   Applications are now open for the Google for Startups Immersion - powered by Antler - a two-phased technical sprint designed for founders with a product in the wild and the ambition to lead the AI-native era.   Four sessions. Two weeks. Hands-on with Google's full AI stack and Antler’s expertise on building a venture scale business fast. Apply now! Last date: May 22 Link below 👇

Last call. #AntlerEmbark 3 applications close tonight. We will lead your first round with $450K and work with you to crack US GTM. The biggest barrier for Indian founders in the US isn't funding. It's traction. Embark is the only program designed to solve actual traction and PMF in the US market. Once you get there, fundraising becomes a pull, not a push. We don't advise from the sidelines. We co-work alongside you daily in San Francisco — refining your positioning, opening doors to enterprise buyers, pressure-testing your GTM in real time. Two editions. 23 startups. 60%+ achieved US traction. 50%+ raised follow-on capital. Become a part of Silicon Valley. Come with ambition, leave with momentum. Apply before midnight → antler.co/embark

⏰ EMBARK 3 - Apps closing soon. I'm looking for a few outlier founders from India, who want to build for the US/global customer from Day 1. 🚀 I'll lead your pre-seed with $450k (by April 15), and you can join the other Embark 3 participants from 7 countries in San Francisco in May. Here's a sample of founders that were part of Embark 1 or 2: 👊@RebhavBharadwaj, previously our intern @AntlerIndia :), now running @getdodgeai, with a Fortune 500 US customer, now also backed by Accel 👊@lazyapoorv, previously VP, Hardware at Ultrahuman. Building @ProjectMirageHQ (in stealth) - one of the coolest hardware ideas in preparing for an agentic world. Significant seed raised. 👊Jacob Banks, building @sophiieAI, one of the fastest growing young startups from Australia 👊 @anubhabgoel, previously raised >$10M from Chiratae & Omidyar. Currently building @naptick_ for the US market. 👊Steven & Justin, building IndustrialMind for AI-enabled manufacturing, ex. Tesla Gigafactory 👊Vaibhav & Urvin who're building Infer, a leading vertical AI partner for the US insurance sector, with Fortune 100 customers. $5M raised. YC alum. 👊 Lawrence, building Infron, $5M ARR. Previously Alibaba. 👊@yoeven building @interfaze_ai, with thousands of Bay Area developers as users 👊@DrSidBhargava, previously built a venture with $10M+ in revenue. Now building @get_innergize, $3M raised. ... and other amazing founders who are about to hit new milestones (for a later post). 🧗‍♂️ You could be a young AI-native graduate or student, or a repeat founder, or a could be an senior operator at a unicorn, etc. Different backgrounds, but the same US GTM challenges. We'll embed you into a great network and actually co-work with you, as you shift your mindset and camp with your US customer, towards getting traction FAST. Our goal: Can we help you compress typically 18 months of US market learnings, into 3-6 months 🇺🇸 Created by a team that has actual US experience, and knows what it takes to win there. The 13 years I’ve spent in the US - including my time at an iconic venture platform like NEA - has made me acutely aware of what differentiates immigrant founders who win, and what the bar for world-class looks like. You also spend time with some of the best operators, founders and investors in the Bay Area. We've done 95 of these sessions already (check out the website for the list of well-known folks who have engaged). Not panels or lectures or pitches. Just informal chats that keep it real. Short app, due March 28 antler.co/embark @raghavgoyal97 @telljeeves @GowriShankarNag @jasnoorgill

Making 2 investments in outlier teams building for the US customer. By April 15th. I'll lead your 1st round & take you to the US in May. We are investors in Lovable, Pixverse & more. You could be next. Comment/DM, and I'll reach out. If you know someone, refer them :)

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"ONE OF THE BEST EXPERIENCES OF MY STARTUP JOURNEY" Here's a snippet from Jake, the founder of Sophiie AI, one of the fastest growing new startups from Australia. $2M ARR already, with big ambitions to win in the US. It was awesome to see him benefit from @AntlerGlobal Embark, and we all learnt a ton from him - esp. about sales processes. *** Dear Indian / APAC founders who are trying to sell into the US: One thing I've observed over the last 20 years (at the risk of sounding old) re: which immigrant founders make it vs. get stuck... ...is that if you don't go outside your cultural comfort zone quickly to camp with your customer wherever they are, if you keep spending time only with the diaspora in Fremont or San Jose, you're most likely going to struggle to break through some initial false positives when it comes to US PMF. Which is why not just the founder / operator guests, but each Antler Embark cohort itself is a diverse group. So far from 🇮🇳🇸🇬🇨🇳🇲🇾🇫🇷🇲🇦🇦🇺...and growing. The group co-works with us in SF, finds a great initial network, and then camps where the customer is. *** Know someone who this could be a game-changer for? Check out more in the post below 👇 x.com/nitinsharma1/s…

(1) I can assure you that @AntlerIndia, we don’t invest based on validation or traction. We’re happy to invest purely on a napkin-stage idea. 80% of our internal assessment is based on who the founder is, their life story, why they are building and what clarity of insight they have. And evidence of qualities like crazy obsession, agency, audacity, etc. Ideas, products, business plans inevitably morph, the core founder traits don’t. (2) We also don’t give primary importance to pedigree or which college someone went to. That has much less to do with whether someone is founder material. (3) We do ask for high clarity of thinking and whether that’s venture-scalable, that’s all. The venture-scalable part is often something founders haven’t thought of at all. (4) Warm intros can help of course (just given crazy volume, we’ve received 75,000+ apps in the last 5 yrs). (5) I’ve spent 13 yrs in the US, so I am fully aware the risk capital access is at a completely different level. But it’s not as hopeless in India as many suggest. (6) We are happy if our funded founders want to build and stay in India. In parallel, for ventures where the founder wants to immediately go and build in the US (partly because of the extra risk capital as you said), we also now have Embark, an offering that’s helping founders succeed. In the last year, we’ve helped 23 startups land, launch and get traction in the US market. 60% of them are showing the right momentum, 10 have already raised further capital antler.co/embark

INAMO: A KEY ENABLER OF Q-COMM Congrats team Inamo. Been great to see this from Day Zero, and now great to see @Primevp_in join the journey. QCom in India went from horizontals (v1) ➡️ verticals (v2) for products (and now the same playing out for services). But what’s the future? 🔨🪏 Inamo is one of the best infrastructure (picks and shovels) play for the burgeoning quick commerce space in India. And how no one better in the country, than Sumit & Rupesh to build this, with their deep experience across Dunzo, ApnaKlub, Ninjakart, Ola, etc. 💡v3 of quick commerce will also be about shared infra, as every serious player in commerce (legacy brand or a new D2C or a marketplace) now needs to offer hyperlocal, quick commerce capabilities. 🧗‍♂️ This is extremely non-trivial: management and profitable scale up of a dark store network at a micro-market level + logistics to guarantee a great customer experience. m.economictimes.com/tech/funding/q… @bhushan08 @ShastraVC @GembaCapital @HimankAmar @ReetikAgarwal @telljeeves @GowriShankarNag @SusmitPat @AntlerIndia @ojasvi06 @mkt_not

Just ~39 hours to go for the AI Residency application deadline. We want to help you build an AI company that wins globally - from Day Zero. Funding: - ₹4 Cr in potential investment for 11% equity, with an investment decision in just 3 weeks - One-time ₹2L grant to cover expenses (powered by Hancock Prospecting) - Potential $30M+ in follow-on capital as you scale through Seed, and up to Series C Perks: - $1M+ in AI-relevant perks (Including $350K guaranteed Azure Credits regardless of investment). - You don't wait till IC to access perks. These credits are often enough to fully cover your infrastructure costs for launch and initial scaling. - Access up to $4M+ in total perks post-investment US GTM: - Antler Embark, Antler’s post-investment US expansion program - designed to help you find actual US market traction in 3-6 months - You also join one of the world's most vibrant networks with founders in 27 global locations - 60%+ of startups have already achieved US traction post-Embark Learn more and apply: shorturl.at/mWSeX

We just released our latest Market Map of Consumer AI startups being built from India 🇮🇳 charted by @divita_aggl Mapped across Aug ’25 → Jan ’26 Some sharp patterns are emerging >>>> read on!