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Antler CEO Magnus Grimeland says Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on tech: ‘People can innovate from almost anywhere’
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Most venture capital firms get their start in Silicon Valley.
Key facts
- 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
- 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 own data suggests that the average age of AI founders has plummeted, from 40 in 2020 to 29 in 2024
- 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
Summary
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. 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. Antler’s model is simple: Find brilliant people before they start a company, then help them build one. 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.