Principal, Investment Team

About Antler

Antler is a global early-stage VC firm that partners with exceptional founders from day zero to build impactful, scalable companies.

We believe exceptional companies are built by exceptional people, often before an idea, team, or company exists. Our role is to find those people early, surround them with the right co‑founders, capital, and conviction, and help them build ambitious, venture‑scale businesses from scratch.

Founded in 2017, Antler is a global early‑stage investor operating across 27 cities and six continents. In the UK, we are one of the country’s largest pre‑seed funds, backing ambitious founders building across AI, fintech, healthtech, climate, and deeptech, including companies such as Caspa.ai, Unravel, SAMMY Labs, and OCCAM. Globally, we’ve invested in over 1,500 companies (including Lovable, Airalo and Peec AI), supporting more than 10,000 founders, and have the ambition to back thousands more over the coming decade.

This is a core role on Antler UK’s investment team, focused on identifying and backing exceptional founders from day zero.

We’re looking for someone deeply curious about people, ideas, and company‑building – someone who can challenge founders’ thinking, support early strategy, and help turn ambitious ideas into high‑potential businesses. This is a hands‑on investment role spanning founder assessment, company formation, and execution.

You will work with Partners and the Investment Team to source exceptional individuals, support them through Antler’s residency, lead opportunities end‑to‑end from sourcing to IC, and represent Antler in the UK ecosystem.

The pace is intense and highly founder‑facing. This role requires ownership, energy, presence, empathy and judgement under pressure.

This is a London‑based role, typically 4+ days per week in the office.

• Identify and back exceptional founders early:
  Build conviction before traditional signals exist by assessing founder potential, ambition, resilience, and founder‑market fit.
• Leverage trusted relationships within the startup ecosystem:
  Tap into trusted relationships you already hold across founders, operators, investors, universities, and industry communities to find and win exceptional individuals. We want someone with a genuine hunger to find founders – because we need to find a lot of them – as well as build and leverage the broader relationships required to power them.
• Work AI‑first:
  Use AI tools to identify founders, personalise outreach, analyse data at scale, and maximise time spent with founders.
• Support founders from idea to company and beyond:
  Help founders frame problems, validate opportunities, refine business models, understand customers, and build the foundations of scalable companies.
• Guide early company strategy and execution:
  Coach founders on prioritisation, go‑to‑market thinking, business strategy, hiring, fundraising readiness, and the key decisions that shape a company’s early trajectory.
• Lead investment diligence and decision‑making:
  Evaluate founder quality, market opportunities, business potential, competitive dynamics, and execution capability. Bring sharp recommendations to IC.
• Support fundraising and growth:
  Shape investor narratives, prepare founders for pre‑seed and seed rounds, leverage networks for talent, customers, and investors, and support successful fundraising processes.
• Strengthen the platform:
  Improve how we assess and support founders, contribute to Antler’s ecosystem presence, and build scalable systems and processes that maximise founder‑facing time.

We don’t expect you to tick every box. If this excites you, we’d love to hear from you.

• A founder
• An early employee or operator at a high‑growth startup
• An investor, operator, or advisor with significant exposure to early‑stage investing

VC experience is helpful, but not required. Deep experience building, scaling, or supporting early‑stage companies is. We care more about the substance of your experience than the names on your CV, and we actively look for talented people from non‑obvious places.

• Significant experience building, operating in, or…