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.

About the Role
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.

What You’ll Do

• 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

What We’re Looking For

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

Background

This role is likely a strong fit if you’ve been:

• 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. 

Experience & Capability

• Significant experience building, operating in, or investing in high-growth startups, with exposure to the pre-seed and pre-revenue stages
• Former founder experience is a strong advantage, particularly with firsthand fundraising experience and the ability to empathise with founders
• Strong commercial judgement with the ability to assess markets, business models, and founder potential
• An active and credible network across the UK startup ecosystem that can be leveraged from day one
• A proven ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving, and resource-constrained environments
• Comfortable coaching founders and making sound decisions with imperfect information

How You Operate

• Clear, confident communicator who builds trust quickly and leads sharp, honest conversations
• Bias to action: proactive, takes ownership, and turns up with solutions rather than waiting for instruction or permission
• Curious, commercially grounded, and energised by early-stage ambiguity
• Highly independent and accountable for outcomes
• Fluent with AI tools and workflows, and quick to adopt new ones
• Direct but kind; intense, low-ego, and focused on better decisions

What We Offer

• A global platform: exposure to one of the biggest pre-seed funds in the UK and an international network spanning 27 cities, with the deal flow, ideas, and relationships that come with it
• A front-row seat to helping build companies from day zero 
• Real ownership and responsibility from day one
• Close partnership with an ambitious investment team
• Participation in carried interest in UK Fund II
• Competitive salary and performance-based bonus
• 23 days’ leave plus public holidays and office closure between Christmas and New Year
• A clear path to grow your scope and influence as Antler UK scales

We do not sponsor visas. You must have the right to work in the UK.

Our Selection Process
We review applications on a rolling basis and encourage early submissions.

• Introductory conversation to explore your background, judgement, and motivation
• A working session-style first interview, including preparation of either an investment memo or structured founder/product assessment (details provided)
• Final conversations with senior members of the UK team, concluding with an in-person discussion with a UK Partner