Also, 80 per cent of its UK portfolio firms raise pre-seed funding within nine months of investment. The firm’s London partners Adam French, a former Goldman Sachs banker and co-founder of Scalable Capital, and Hannah Leach, founder of the UK’s first alumni-focused venture fund, agree on prioritising the quality of the individual, over the idea they arrive with. “We usually ask really unusual questions – ‘what’s the hardest week you’ve ever had in your life’ – that kind of thing,” French told City AM.

“It’s about trying to feel for the makeup of the individual and see if they’re cut out to be a founder”. “It is very rare that someone arrives with an idea and are still building it now”, Leach said, adding that the residency is designed to stress-test everything, and most ideas do not survive that process intact. Antler’s founders That is well illustrated by the story of Listo.

Its three Spanish co-founders, chief executive Andreu Paddack, chief tech officer Alejandro Navarro Garcia and chief operating officer Juan Destribats, arrived with a consumer music product eighteen months in development that did not outlast the first week. The company they built instead enables businesses to distribute and sell services through AI platforms including ChatGPT and Claude, and was among 13 UK startups receiving a combined £2.7m from Antler’s April 2026 cohort. “The Antler team made us reconsider everything without actually telling us to pivot,” says Paddack.

“It was not easy – we are not from here, and it was a case of making this work or returning to Spain.” Shaheer Aslam Joiya, co-founder of Synthax Healthcare, left a career as an NHS surgeon to address a problem he had encountered daily. His past career taught him that the UK loses an estimated £9bn annually to clinical administration, with doctors spending more than three hours a day on documentation and referrals. In response, Synthax automates those workflows within existing hospital systems and is already deployed across more than 20 organisations, with tenfold month-on-month user growth and six letters of intent signed for commercial rollout.

“Every solution doctors have been given has made their working lives more complicated, not less,” he told City AM. “That is what we are trying to change.” Also in the current cohort are Siegfried Thun-Hohenstein and Paul Roever, building Osira, an AI co-scientist for medicinal chemistry, and Jono Caseley, co-founder of 3Square, an AI decision intelligence platform for hybrid human and AI teams. “Finding a co-founder is genuinely complex”, said Caseley.

“You need to be at a similar stage of life, bring complementary skills, and care about the same problem. The residency accelerates that process”. A younger and faster generation of founders New Antler research, drawn from a study of more than 400 European startups in its portfolio, points to a founder generation that is younger and building faster than any previous cohort.

The average age of a founder behind a European AI company that has already reached unicorn status is now 28, against 32 for European unicorns more broadly, and startups founded in the past year within Antler’s European portfolio are reaching first revenue three times faster than those founded three years ago. Much of that acceleration is attributed to AI tools, with ninety-three per cent of founders surveyed using AI to complete tasks that would previously have required specialist outside expertise. Meanwhile, 52 per cent named Claude or Claude Code as their most indispensable tool, more than three times the proportion citing ChatGPT.

The personal cost is documented in the same data: 43 per cent have not taken a holiday in the past twelve months, and a quarter report spending less time with family or on their own health. This is unfolding against a backdrop of deteriorating confidence among UK founders more broadly. A fifth of British entrepreneurs told the Entrepreneurs Network recently that they intend to leave the country within twelve months, with 86 per cent saying the current government does not understand their needs.

French and Leach do not dispute the frustration but resist the broader conclusion. “We have the third-largest tech ecosystem in the world, with one in every ten software engineers in Europe based here”, says French. “We find ourselves having to make that argument, and that is a problem in itself.” The area where both partners want direct policy intervention is visas. Around 20 per cent of residency applications