Delayed, Antler Soon to Open First Cohort in Indonesia

Antler, program startupbuilders and a global incubator from Singapore, appointed former CEO Carmudi Subir Lohani as country head for Antler Indonesia. Under Lohani's leadership, Antler will step on the gas by launching cohort The first is in January 2022.

In a joint interview DailySocial.id, Lohani explained that Antler's plan to enter Indonesia had been announced at the end of 2019. However, his execution was delayed due to the pandemic, until finally he officially appointed himself as country head for Indonesia.

“Nothing is different from the previous plan. We want to make a local program in Jakarta. Antler wants to open up access to more entrepreneur Indonesia to start a startup through our platform, get funding, and the ecosystem,” he explained.

Under his leadership, Antler will build a small team to begin with cohort first in Jakarta in January 2022 and started investing in startups through fund Southeast Asia. It is targeted that in its first debut, Antler can invest in the initial stages for 10-15 startups, with a long-term target in the next four to five years to attract 100 local startups.

“Antler will be one of the few players pre seed structured in Indonesia, with the ability to support the founder startups on their way from the start. We partner and nurture founders to build a strong team to realize their vision of becoming a scalable business in local and global markets.”

According to him, talent pool in Indonesia are many and varied. Antler looking for founder who are execution-focused, flexible, and have a clear vision of the problem they want to solve. “Para founder must be tough enough to be able to build for the long term.”

The Antler incubator program runs for six months in two phases. In the first ten-week phase, the Antler team helped para founder to validate their business ideas, prove product market fit, and build a strong team.

Then in the second phase, Antler invests in the strongest team, who will continue to build and scale their startup in preparation for Demo Day. A number of local startups have become alumni in Antler through cohort Singapore. Base, Side, Robin, and Bubays are some of the names.

To date, Antler has supported 90 startups in Southeast Asia since cohort first in Singapore in July 2018. In 2020 alone, Antler has amassed 27 potential startups. Overall, out of seven cohort held, in total raised over $70 million in funding.

In the global arena, Antler has invested in 58 new startups until the first half of 2021. Apart from Indonesia, this year Antler also inaugurated its presence in Vietnam, South Korea, and Canada.

The next startup vertical trend

According to Lohani, Indonesia's technology ecosystem is still in its early stages, even though the first generation of startups has reached status unicorns, decacorns, and IPO exit like Bukalapak. The next generation will be full of increasingly diversified verticals, such as agritech, digitizing SMEs, fintech, and B2B.

In vertical fintech for example, with a growing middle class, he believed that services e-wallet, wealth management, millennial investing and savings platforms are increasingly appearing across traditional and non-traditional asset classes. Then, for the digitization of MSMEs, more and more startups are providing solutions around this. Both from the supply chain and other related sectors to better enable the growth of MSMEs in the country.

“Indonesia has the potential to become a regional leader in agritech, with Indonesian-focused players looking to grow to solve similar problems on a regional scale.”

Besides Antler, previously there have been a number of global accelerator programs and are now increasingly actively targeting local startups to participate in every event cohort which was held. They are Plug and Play, Accelerating Asia, Surge, Y Combinator, Endeavor, Google, and many more.