Venture Capital firm Antler unveils platform to fund and support founders build businesses on ONDC

As the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) continues to grow and gain user acceptance, the venture capitalist community is taking notice. In an industry-first initiative, the Indian arm of the global early-stage VC firm Antler has launched a platform that will offer funding and venture-building support to entrepreneurs building businesses on the open protocol.  

The platform offers pre-seed capital of $300,000, along with an additional investment up to $200,000 from key partners in the Antler network, for ready teams with an idea, the company said. The initiative was launched in Bengaluru on Wednesday at an event attended by notable figures including Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of Infosys; T Koshy, CEO of ONDC; Pramod Varma and Sujith Nair, Co-founders of FIDE.

Nilekani said ONDC provides an open, equitable, and democratic growth model, urging innovators and companies to build upon it. “Whenever we have these digital public infrastructures (DPIs), it is those companies that are not conflicted or who do not have any baggage embrace the technology and create successful companies on top of these technologies. Today, ONDC and Beckn (the base protocol layer that powers ONDC) are at this juncture where they are ready and it is up to the great innovators to improve and build on this. I’m grateful and congratulate the team from Antler because they have had the foresight to see that this growing community is going to create a lot of great companies. I’m sure, five years from now, there will be many unicorns and decacorns from this group,” he said.

The platform is designed to support pre-team and pre-idea founders with a curated community to help them accelerate their early journey, by building alongside experts, operators and network participants such as Namma Yatri, Plotch.ai, SellerApp, and Magicpin. The community will also facilitate problem-solving sessions and office hours with leaders in the DPI ecosystem, such as Varma of FIDE; Vibhor Jain, COO, ONDC; and Abey Zacharia, ONDC Specialist. Furthermore, a select number of founders building on ONDC and looking for founding teams have the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Antler India Residency, a cohort-based programme that offers resources, mentorship, and networking opportunities for new founders.  

“India has digitised identity and payments, and we believe it is time to now set our sights on the next major unlock—digitising commerce. Only 6 per cent of MSMEs are active sellers on digital platforms. With ONDC, we believe this has the potential to grow to 30-40 per cent over the next decade, boosting massive growth for India. As the first VC to launch a platform to increase talent density and enable opportunities on ONDC, we are excited to partner with visionaries such as Nilekani and the FIDE, ONDC leadership. We are excited to see founders building at population scale in themes like complex commerce, vernacular commerce and flow-based lending, to name a few. The Antler ONDC platform will provide everything from the best resources to a vibrant community and seed capital for them,” Nitin Sharma, Partner at Antler in India, said.  

Antler recently led the pre-seed funding round in ONDC rail infrastructure start-up Plotch. The round also saw participation of Peak XV, Global Founders Capital, and Apoletto.