Fintech Startup Founder

Ready to build or already building your startup and get funded in 10 weeks? We’re a global early-stage VC backing founders from day zero. We invest up to €400k through our founder residency – a building sprint where you leverage community, sparring, and intense effort to make 1 year of progress in 10 weeks.

About Antler

Join the next Nordics residency starting September 1st, 2025, in Stockholm. Build your company alongside a cohort of pre-vetted, exceptional potential co-founders, validate your ideas, engage with customers, develop your MVP, refine your business model, and create your go-to-market strategy before pitching to the investment committee.

Who Makes a Great Fintech Founder?

As a fintech founder, your expertise in financial services, payments, or blockchain will be critical in building and scaling a venture-backed startup. You might be:

• A finance or banking professional ready to transition from industry to founding your own company.
• A software engineer or product leader with experience building financial technology products.
• A business development or operations expert with a track record in payments, lending, or insurtech.
• A technical architect or builder who thrives on solving complex fintech challenges at scale.

Founder DNA: What Sets You Apart?

Beyond technical ability, the best startup CTOs have:

• Inner drive – You have a vision for what you want to build and the ambition to execute.
• Creative problem-solving – You don’t just code; you build scalable systems and innovative solutions.
• Grit – You thrive in uncertainty, iterate quickly, and push through technical and business challenges.

The Antler Founder Residency:

The residency starts on September 1st, 2025, and runs for 10 weeks, full-time, in-person in Stockholm. Any adjustments have to be agreed to in the interview process.

Our residency program is fairly unstructured, with 90%+ of the time focused dedicated to founders working on their companies and making week-over-week progress. Here are some examples of things that founders focus on, depending on where they are at in their company journey:

• Find and vet potential cofounders
• Validate core assumptions around your business ideas and find meaningful market insight
• Build prototypes, find design partners, launch pilots, close customers
• Get feedback from functional experts and dedicated coaches
• Reach milestones that align with pre-seed funding

If founders have already accomplished any of the above, they dedicate their full effort on the next most important milestones.

Antler Investment Process

• At the end of the 10-week residency, you will have the opportunity to present to the Antler Investment Committee. If approved by the investment committee, you will receive a pre-seed commitment of €400,000 in two tranches. €100k for 10% and €300k in follow-on capital.
• Companies that receive investment at the end of the residency will join the Antler portfolio and gain even higher touch programming from our partners. This includes access our network of downstream investors, integration into the Antler Nordics portfolio and global portfolio network, and introductions to relevant partners and discounted service providers.

About Antler

Antler is a early-stage VC that is changing the way people build companies. We operate in 30 locations worldwide, have supported 8,000+ founders through our residencies, and invested in 1500+ startups globally. We launched Antler to build a better on-ramp to venture capital. After working in venture-backed companies for years, we built Antler to provide founders with a structured and transparent process to successfully launch a new venture, a community for support throughout the experience, and a clear pathway to venture funding.

Antler Highlights:

Some examples of successful companies that were built as a result of Antler’s residency, received pre-seed investment from Antler, and have gone on to raise substantial investments are as follows:

• Airalo: The world’s first eSIM subscription and top-up store
• Wingbits: Incentive-based flight tracking platform
• Treyd: Working capital operating system for B2B
• Reebelo: Used electronics marketplace
• Telgea: Global telecom operator
• Glint Solar: Software for identifying the best solar sites faster

Cohort starts: September 1st, 2025, but we're working with founders all year round on an ad hoc basis.

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