Antler data ranks Klarna and Improbable as Europe’s founder pipelines

Klarna and Improbable have produced more European alumni founders whose companies reach Series A than any other companies in a new Antler analysis. The VC firm’s report argues that the strongest founder signal is not a famous logo, but time spent inside a startup while it grows from seed to Series C.

Antler reviewed 51,722 startups in the UK, Germany, France and Sweden that raised seed funding between 2010 and 2021. It then tracked which prior employers produced founders whose own startups later secured Series A rounds.

By that measure, Swedish fintech Klarna ranks first in Europe, with 14 alumni founders reaching Series A. UK deeptech company Improbable follows with eight. Antler said most of the highest-ranked companies globally are in the US, naming Riot Games and LiveRamp among them.

The report is less about Klarna or Improbable as individual companies than about the stage at which employees learned the job. Antler found that founders who had worked at a startup during the seed-to-Series C stretch were nearly twice as likely to build a company that later reached Series A.

Across the European startups in the study, Antler said about 23% raised Series A funding on average. For founders with direct experience at a company moving from seed through Series C, the rate rose to 45.6%.

Growth-stage experience beats the late-stage logo

Antler’s conclusion cuts against a common investor habit: overweighting well-known employers, especially late-stage unicorns and large technology companies, as shorthand for founder quality. Christoph Klink, a partner at Antler, said investors should pay more attention to founders who spent meaningful time inside less visible Series B companies, including in categories such as logistics, rather than relying on mainstream company names.

The report says working at a unicorn shortly before an IPO is a weaker signal than having been inside a startup during a difficult Series A period. Antler did not say that late-stage experience has no value, but its data ranks earlier scaling experience as the stronger predictor of a founder’s own ability to reach Series A.

For European investors, that is a practical sourcing problem. The best-known alumni networks are easy to screen for because they sit on CVs and LinkedIn profiles. The seed-to-Series C path is messier: it requires knowing which companies were scaling at the time, what role a future founder held, and whether they were close to the operating pressure that came with fundraising and growth.

How the finding compares with other founder-factory rankings

Antler’s findings overlap with prior work from Accel, which has also examined Europe’s founder factories. Accel found that Klarna, Spotify and Deliveroo have produced more second-generation startups than other unicorns in the region.

The distinction is the yardstick. Accel’s analysis focused on the volume of startups created by alumni of major European tech companies. Antler’s report narrows the question to alumni founders whose companies reached Series A, then links that outcome to the stage of the employer where those founders previously worked.

That makes the report more useful for investors trying to refine founder assessment than for anyone looking for a simple prestige ranking. It also gives companies such as Improbable, which sits outside consumer internet visibility, a stronger case as talent exporters. Antler’s data does not disclose the performance of those alumni companies beyond reaching Series A, nor does it assess revenue, valuation or exit outcomes.

This story draws on original reporting from Sifted.