Antares Ventures Passes $50M at Fund I's Second Close

Asia's industrial customers occupy two places in Antares Ventures' investment model: the market a startup hopes to reach and the source of operating knowledge it needs to get there. The Singapore firm is building its deep-tech strategy around that relationship, pairing globally sourced science and engineering with commercial support across the region.

Antares Ventures I has secured more than $50M in cumulative commitments at its second close, announced on October 14, 2026. The firm is continuing toward a $100M final target and says approximately $27M has already been invested across 9 companies, according to its fund announcement.

For founders developing equipment that must work inside power networks, factories or transport systems, the investor's usefulness can extend well beyond the financing. Antares is offering help with the industrial relationships and implementation work that connect a technical advantage to a customer willing to adopt it. That proposition gives the fundraise its commercial significance as energy, computing and industrial infrastructure become more closely connected.

What Antares Ventures I Has Closed

The second close brings Antares Ventures I above $50M in commitments following an initial close earlier in 2026. The $100M figure remains the final fundraising target, while the amount added specifically in this second close has not been disclosed. TNGlobal's October 14 coverage corroborates the announcement and identifies the vehicle as the firm's first fund.

The investors include family offices and corporate and strategic investors from Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. Antares has not named individual LPs or an anchor investor in the announcement. Its continued fundraising sits alongside selective deployment, so the portfolio is already developing while the vehicle is still being assembled.

Those distinctions matter when reading the headline. Commitments describe the backing secured for the fund; they should not be treated as a new operating-company financing or as a statement of cash immediately available for new investments. The reported deployment also cannot be subtracted from the commitment figure to produce a reliable estimate of remaining investment capacity, which would require information about fund economics and obligations that the announcement does not provide.

The Customer Work Inside the Investment Strategy

Antares invests from Seed to Series B and describes an approach that combines global sourcing with local operating support. Its current firm overview places the work across energy systems, compute and digital infrastructure, industry, and infrastructure applications. The commercial ambition is to help scientific and engineering businesses reach Asian markets through relationships and knowledge built in those markets.

For an industrial buyer, adopting a technology creates a set of decisions that reaches beyond whether the invention works. The buyer also has to consider integration, maintenance, operating responsibilities and the consequences of changing equipment already in service. These are practical features of the adoption problem, and they help explain why a founder might value an investor who can participate in customer development.

Antares says its support includes governance, industrial partnerships, pilots, localization and regional expansion. An investor participating in that work has to understand the buyer's operating environment as well as the startup's financing needs. That makes the quality of the relationship with an industrial partner part of the investment proposition: the partner can help reveal what a promising technology would have to become before an organization can use it reliably.

A Portfolio Across Storage, Grids and Industry

The firm's portfolio register separates Fund I investments from pre-fund holdings, an important distinction when assessing what this particular vehicle owns. Its Fund I companies include VFlowTech, IONATE, enaDyne, The ePlane Company, Ayrton Energy, FeX Energy, Ackcio, Open Ocean Robotics and Hydroleap. Together they reach into storage, grid technology, industrial processes, mobility, monitoring and water treatment.

Two examples make the mandate concrete. VFlowTech develops vanadium redox flow battery systems for long-duration energy storage, with applications including utilities and data centers. IONATE develops hybrid intelligent transformers and software intended to improve power control across electrical systems. The products give the fund exposure to different parts of the same customer problem: making electrical infrastructure more useful to the organizations depending on it.

A storage supplier and a transformer developer can face different engineering challenges while meeting related customer concerns about power availability, reliability and integration. That gives Antares a way to connect learning across its portfolio without pretending the companies share one product or sales process. The firm's regional commercialization mandate is therefore most useful when it remains specific to each technology, buyer and installation; a portfolio map alone cannot establish how far any individual deployment has progressed.

The People Carrying the Regional Model

Founder and Managing Partner Michael Gryseels previously spent 20 years at McKinsey and served as chief digital officer at CP Group. His biography also describes an earlier family-office and syndicate investment strategy, which should be kept separate from the current fund's results. The connection to corporate operating environments is relevant to a firm promising to help founders navigate industrial adoption.

Partners Louis Murayama and Milena Nikolova bring additional experience across deep-tech investing, company formation, investment banking and capital allocation. Murayama's official profile says he joined in early 2024 and helped shape the fund's strategy and formation. Nikolova's background includes Aera VC and UBS, adding another perspective on how emerging technologies meet investors' allocation decisions.

The firm's August Beyond Carbon & Silicon framework connects power, thermal management, materials and system control. Its central investment argument is that infrastructure performance depends on how those constraints interact. For founders approaching Antares, that suggests a useful way to frame the commercial conversation: identify the customer's operating constraint and explain how the technology can improve it within the system the customer already has.

As Antares continues raising Fund I, the partners are supporting a portfolio whose engineering will encounter different buyers, integration requirements and regional conditions. The fund's commercialization proposition will keep acquiring detail through those relationships, as each company works out how its technology fits the industrial customer on the other side of the introduction.