Antler CEO Magnus Grimeland says Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on tech: ‘People can innovate from almost anywhere’

In 2025, venture capital firm Antler opened its 27th global office in San Francisco, its third office in the U.S. following Austin and New York City. 

“Silicon Valley is still the biggest ecosystem in the world,” Antler’s Norwegian founder Magnus Grimeland said at the VC firm’s Singapore headquarters. But Grimeland’s late entry into Silicon Valley reflects his firm’s approach on building a venture capital firm. “People can innovate from almost anywhere, and at a level they weren’t able to before.”

Eight years after its founding, Antler has expanded to 27 cities across six continents, with more than 1,500 investments and more than $1 billion in assets under management. In 2024, Pitchbook deemed it the world’s most active venture capital firm. Last year, Antler made more than 400 investments, roughly one every 22 hours, and raised $510 million in new capital, including a $160 million U.S.-focused fund closed in December.

Antler’s model is simple: Find brilliant people before they start a company, then help them build one. And while Antler has a limited track record—none of its portfolio companies have launched an IPO—Grimeland thinks a global footprint and an AI application boom is going to set his VC fund up for success. 

How Antler got started

After a stint as a soldier in Norway’s Special Forces and a consultant in McKinsey, Grimeland became a startup founder, moving to Singapore to set up Zalora, Southeast Asia’s first major fashion e-commerce platform, in 2013. Rocket Internet, one of Zalora’s backers, eventually consolidated the platform into a new company called Global Fashion Group, and Grimeland became its chief operating officer. 

Southeast Asia was a trial-by-fire for Grimeland. “The region has hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of islands, a little bit of corruption and fraud, and everyone uses cash,” Grimeland says. “We thought we were starting a tech company, but instead we ended up building physical infrastructure like warehouses and roads.”

Zalora became a training ground for a whole host of other startup founders. Kevin Aluwi and Nadiem Makarim, co-founders of the Indonesian ride-hailing app Gojek, are Zalora alumni. Michele Ferrario, Zalora’s group CEO, founded StashAway, a Singaporean wealth management startup. Other Zalora executives founded ShopBack, a consumer rewards startup.

Grimeland eventually jumped ship himself, founding Antler in 2017. “Our ambition was to be the first investor into the world’s greatest talents, no matter where they come from or what their background is,” he explains.

Antler positioned itself as a “day zero” investor, meaning it backs founders from the very start, before they’ve even started building their businesses. The firm’s flagship residency program gives founders up to $400,000 in initial investment and access to a network of mentors and advisors. 

Two Antler companies became unicorns last year: eSIM marketplace Airalo, worth above $1 billion, and Swedish vibe coding platform, Lovable, which was valued at $6.6 billion as of last December. (In March, Lovable reported $400 million in annual recurring revenue). Yet none of Antler’s investments, as of now, have tapped the public markets, the traditional exit for a VC-backed startup. 

Not everyone sees Antler’s aggressive and widespread funding as an asset. Some observers, uncharitably, have called it “spray and pray”; essentially, arguing that venture funds like Antler invest in everything and hope that something works out.

Grimeland pushes back against such critiques. “It’s hard to get the flywheel off the ground, but then you learn to do things better,” he acknowledges, adding that “the first fund Antler raised was completely based on personal relationships, plus my own money from the Zalora sale.” He now claims Antler raises more money each week than it did during its first year. The firm raised $510 million in 2025 alone.

Grimeland isn’t alone in sticking with a diversified approach; Carta’s Peter Walker, based on simulations, has suggested that smaller bets on more companies is a better approach for all but the most successful venture funds.

That being said, Antler is considering moving past its lane of funding founders that are just getting started. “Moving forward, we want to launch a growth vehicle where we can continue to back people all the way to their IPO or exit,” he says. 

A global footprint

At the heart of Antler’s global presence is Grimeland’s belief that innovation is increasingly decentralized, and founders can be found anywhere. The firm now covers more than 20 cities across six continents; Grimeland thinks there’s still room to expand to as many as five new locations (which would bring its footprint to around 35 offices). 

For Grimeland, that means a firm without a global on-the-ground presence will always lose out. “We see VCs flying from the rest of the world to Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, or Manila, but they’d always end up investing in the third or fourth best founders,” he says. “The firms with on-the-ground operations know who the strongest founders are, and those founders gravitate toward them.”

Yet while future unicorns can be found in any part of the world, Grimeland says that founders need to have a global mindset from day one. “There was a period of time where you can just focus on building regional companies that become really big,” he says. “But if you look at the biggest companies we have in our portfolio now, they’re the ones that are winning globally.”

Antler now sees Africa as a growth area for tomorrow’s startups. The fund opened an office in Nairobi in 2019, and in Lagos in 2025. When Antler launched on the continent, it received 5,000 applications which eventually got whittled down to its first cohort of 40 founders.

Grimeland thinks Africa looks like Southeast Asia a decade ago, with a “tremendous number of people who want to build.”

“People have been talking about Africa for a very long time, but now it feels like the fundamentals of the economies are growing very rapidly,” he said. “Antler can provide access and capital, and when we do that, people build incredible companies.”

The AI application boom

Artificial intelligence, which Grimeland calls the “biggest opportunity” he’s ever seen, is Antler’s next big swing. 

Lovable is probably Antler’s greatest success so far. The European vibe-coding startup hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after its founding; a recent funding round in December helped make co-founder Fabian Hedin, at 26, Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire.

In addition to Lovable, other AI bets by Antler include wrtn technologies, a South Korea startup that uses AI to generate stories for its users, and which is also on track to hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue this year. (Antler partner and wrtn backer Martell Hardenberg, in an interview with Fortune, previously cited the “loneliness epidemic” for his interest in the Korean startup).

Yet Grimeland thinks that most discussions of AI have focused on “driving efficiency.” The real opportunity, is instead “when AI allows us to start solving problems that haven’t been solved before,” such as how the tech is revolutionizing antibiotic discovery, by crafting novel molecules to fight drug-resistant bacteria.

Most of the biggest deals around AI have focused on infrastructure, whether foundational model developers like OpenAI or Anthropic, or data center operators. But Grimeland thinks the bigger opportunities will come from companies that build compelling applications on top of that infrastructure. 

“In the early days of mobile phones, the most valuable companies in the world were Singtel, AT&T, Cisco, and other infrastructure players,” Grimeland explains. “But if you think about the mobile ecosystem today, Singtel’s market cap is just a fraction of that of software companies like Meta.” (As of April, Cisco is valued at $354 billion, while Meta is valued at $1.7 trillion).

Grimeland says founders need to get into AI while the space is still nascent. Today’s entrepreneurs can build startups that solve all the easy problems–and then as the tech matures, the next generation of founders will be stuck with “very complex stuff where deep experience matters.”

And if you have an idea? Grimeland says founders-to-be need to stop talking about their plans, and start acting on them. Antler’s own data suggests that the average age of AI founders has plummeted, from 40 in 2020 to 29 in 2024. “We’re seeing that potentially 25 is the new 30,” Antler co-founder Fridtjof Berge told Fortune in January.

“I have a lot of friends who spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about things they’re very passionate about, and really seem to want to do something about it,” Grimeland says. “But then, 20 years later, they’re still working at Goldman Sachs.”

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