Antler CEO Magnus Grimeland says Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on tech: ‘People can innovate from almost anywhere’

Most venture capital firms get their start in Silicon Valley. It took Antler almost a decade to open its first office there. 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. But Grimeland’s late entry into Silicon Valley reflects his firm’s approach on building a venture capital firm. “People can innovate from almost anywhere, and at a level they weren’t able to before.” 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. In 2024, Pitchbook deemed it the world’s most active venture capital firm. 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 model is simple: Find brilliant people before they start a company, then help them build one. And while Antler has a limited track record—none of its portfolio companies have launched an IPO—Grimeland thinks a global footprint and an AI application boom is going to set his VC fund up for success. How Antler got started 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. Rocket Internet, one of Zalora’s backers, eventually consolidated the platform into a new company called Global Fashion Group, and Grimeland became its chief operating officer. Southeast Asia was a trial-by-fire for Grimeland. “The region has hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of islands, a little bit of corruption and fraud, and everyone uses cash,” Grimeland says.