Asia's AI & Crypto Decade

Transcript

Hey guys, great to see everyone. Wonderful to be here. Always been a big fan of Token 2049. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we do at Antler. We are now the most active AI investor in the world and also how we look at what's happening in Asia and what's happening in the AI / blockchain space. So yeah, great to see everyone. Thanks for coming by. So Antler, we are now the most active early stage investor in the world. We have offices in about 30 locations globally.

We have funds all over the globe. We have about 26 billion dollar portfolio value. We have 2000 portfolio companies. In each of these locations, we work with founders and back them from day zero and continue to back them up until series C. So you can basically do everything from a few hundred K checks to a hundred million dollar checks all over the world. We have 240 full-time investment professionals. So if you're building something or if you're excited about building something or you are raising capital, please reach out to us. We we can invest at almost any stage.

We are the most active AI investor in the world right now. This is data from Dealroom. We back not only great companies out of the US and the West but also all over Asia, Africa and South America. This is our funnel currently. So I think we have the most amount of kind of founder interactions every year. More than 160,000 founders apply to Antler every year and we work with about 3000 of them. So if you need a space to work on building your business, we have offices in all these locations I showed earlier.

And we'll work with you and provide access to great VCs, co-founders, iterating the business model, first capital and customers, anything you need help with. And And we back about 400 to 500 new companies every year. I continue to back companies all the way to their exit, basically. So, the goal is to put hundreds of millions of dollars to work in your company over time. These are some of our portfolio companies. You might know a few of them. Lovable, fast-growing company in history.

Actually, I think uh they grew faster to a million 100 million dollars than any other business ever. Uh Airalo, few of you are probably using that product. Who's using Airalo right now? Yeah, hundreds of people. Uh it's uh the biggest eSIM marketplace in the world that was built out of Singapore in our offices. Uh we were the first investor, second investor, third investor, fourth investor, fifth investor, sixth investor. We backed them on their entire journey. Um Written, fast-growing AI company out of Korea.

Uh Micro loan, one of the fast-growing AI companies out of the US. Same with the Pix uh Fluid stack. Pix was by far the best AI video model in the world uh based out of here. Uh big operations in China, customers all over the world. Salmon, fast-growing fintech here in Southeast Asia right now, actually. Uh very exciting business. And And Dream, probably the best um cybersecurity AI defense in in in the world. These are just some of our portfolio companies um out of out of 2,000. In the space of kind of blockchain and AI, we have three very exciting companies we backed recently. Uh one of those is called HiFi. We were there from the first round. We just took part in

their latest uh massive round. They're in the space of of fiat to to crypto onboarding and offboarding all over the world, basically building rails. Cream is uh I think a tremendous uh company who's uh using AI on on the blockchain to solve very specific problems in the financial industry. Wingbits is the super interesting actually because it's it's kind of a real world blockchain uh case that works incredibly well. So, probably most of you have heard about Flightradar. Who has heard about Flightradar? It's basically these radars that track all the flights across the globe. They also track drones. They track all types of uh flying objects basically.

But, it's a very outdated technology uh run by this uh volunteer network all over the globe. Now, what Wingbits did is they put this whole thing on the blockchain. So, basically you can you can buy your own radar, join the chain, start tracking flying objects, and get paid for it, which is something blockchain is perfect for. And obviously now they're using AI to discover smaller and smaller objects all over the globe and growing like crazy. They basically caught up with uh Flightradar. I think I think it's been in business for like 30 35 years. They caught up with them in about a year year past. So, uh yeah, three very exciting use cases.

I mean, we all know this, right? LLMs is seeing the most massive uh growth in uh revenue that the world has ever seen. We see that in our portfolio. Uh we see that in publicly reported numbers. And companies are scaling faster than ever, right? It took uh the airline industry if you think about the first person who went on an airline, how long time do you think it took until 50 million people had been flying on airplane? Anyone want to guess?

50 million people being airline customers. 50 years, very close. 68 years. So, the airline industry spent 68 years getting to 50 million customers. It took ChatGPT 5 days. It took Pokémon Go 14 days. Right? It's uh if you have product market fit in today's world, you can scale faster than It took our portfolio lovable uh 10 months to get from zero to 100 million in revenue. And uh yeah, it's just the most exciting times to be alive with a big AI platform shift.

Also, the capability is just doubling every few months. All right, if you look at the latest models that are coming out and you compare to just what we had available to us a few months from now, the intelligence level is way above what it was just a few months ago. And the cost per token gets lower and lower, which means that a lot of the things you guys might be thinking about or use cases you'll be working on in your companies, they're going to be more and more possible going forward. And uh being on the front end of this is just creating tremendous amount of opportunities.

And one of the areas where Asia is particularly good when it comes to this is the cost per token. All right, you have almost the same level of intelligence, but the cost is drastically lower, which creates a lot of opportunities for for mass progress and scale uh that you don't see in other parts of the world. The next wave of AI will therefore, I think, be built in Asia. All right? We are in the marketplace where a lot of the open-weight models are being built and by far the leading ones, which have much lower cost than the frontier labs in the US.

We're also in the place where all of the chips are being made. Like all the most advanced chips in the world and also the cheapest chips and the memory and most of the things that go into the systems that are enabling AI are built here in Asia. And if you travel around the region and you went to some of the robotic factories and you compare with what you see elsewhere, it is way ahead. Right? You have robot Olympics, you have drone competitions. You have all of these things that robots are doing which are just way ahead what you see in the rest of the world.

So I think the center of gravity when it comes to real innovation and not copying what happened in the past is moving towards Asia. So you're in the right place at the right time. And you can see that in terms of what's happening with token usage. Right? So these are the weekly tokens being used on the top models across the globe. These are the US models in green.

And then you see the Chinese models which are all of them open-source models. And then you see the rest of the world finally coming. This is a development that I think a lot of people didn't expect a year or two ago. But it's really happening right now. And you see big parts of the world but also some of the world's best companies building on top of the open-source models because they don't want their proprietary data to go to the big frontier labs. And they don't trust that even if they say it will be split out that it I it actually is.

So this is a huge opportunity not only to provide cheaper tokens but also to provide um uh a decentralized access to the highest intelligence in the world which I think very fits very well in with the with the mantra and the modus of Token 2049 that you can access these models um uh and build with them in the way that you want to do and not dependent on some major corporation deciding how to use your model. And obviously, what's driving all of this is power.

And this is insane. Right? Um if you think about as the cost of chips goes down, as models become more efficient, the cost of intelligence will get more and more equal to the cost of power. Right? In the same way as over time, anything that uses gasoline or anything that uses electricity, as you know, components and you know, things gets cheaper, uh the biggest cost of running these things will be electricity. And it will be the same with AI.

And clearly now, China and Asia is leading the power race. Right? The amount of power being put online in China every year equates to what come came online in the US the last decade. Right? So, this is not only something that has happened in the past, but it's continued to happening into the future. And that creates huge opportunities for people to build here in the region the leading AI companies of the decade. And it also means obviously that the US and and Europe has some real work to do.

And it's difficult because building power station, nobody wants a power station in the backyard. Right? But even even if it's uh renewable energy, um windmills and and solar panels, they take up space and they might not be that amazing to look at. So, it's hard to work through all that regulatory red tape. While in Asia, they're building power like crazy, which will enable the companies of the future. And I'm very excited about what's happening in the fintech blockchain space, right? If you think about how this has developed in Asia up until now,

we actually skipped a whole generation of financial software and financial technology, right? We went straight from cash to people paying with the phone. Right? We skipped cards more or less altogether. I built an e-commerce company before in Asia called Zalora, and we literally had people pay with on our website or they paid by wallets, but in Indonesia at the time there was 3% credit card penetration. And I think the same is happening. I think we'll we'll get to an economy now where more and more of the economy in Asia will run on the blockchain.

Um and particularly uh within the agent-to-agent economy. And I think this is probably the biggest opportunity in the financial industry today. Let me go back to it. I think I missed a slide. I think this is probably the biggest opportunity in the world today. That you'll see agents transacting with each other and not going through human beings or banks at all. And we already see that with a number of that are struggling with this particular problem. And I know there's a lot of companies out there who's working on it.

Probably there are people here in the audience that are working on it. But this is I think a place where Asia can really win and build that next generation leading companies. And this is probably a multi-trillion dollar opportunity um that we are working on. And if you guys in the room are working on it or interested in being part of that, uh reach out to us. If we can be helpful with anything, let me know. We back great founders from the really early days up until series C. We also back companies that don't have an idea yet just based off the quality of the founder right so if you're thinking about building something now we just love to work with you in the early days and we have space in our

offices all over the world. So you want to get in contact just reach out to me these are my details and if you want to sign up and you're interested in particularly what I talked about earlier which is the agent to agent economy just scan this QR code and sign up and we'll get in contact with you. I really think this is one of the biggest opportunities in the world and it's a place where we all can work together. So yeah thank you all for coming and thanks for listening to me and look forward to hopefully working with a lot of you going forward most exciting time ever to build great companies. Thank you.