Diversity• Inspirations• Resources• Venture Capital

Women are making their way to change the VC market

Maybe being a women in VC is not yet so common but once you are there you can see more and more female investors coming in and making the boys club circle breaking for good. Laura Chau nicely said: ‘What’s Rarer than a Unicorn in Silicon Valley? A Female VC.’ but she know exactly what it takes to make the VC market more inclusive and if you really love doing something, you will not stop until you join people who also believe in you and your passion for startup ecosystem.

I’d like to present a few examples of extraordinary women who raised their own fund and just run the business according to theirs beliefs. They are so amazing inspiration and with their successful portfolio companies show that they have a good nose for picking up investment opportunities and supporting startups until they succeed globally. Additionally it’s super optimistic that Europe is catching up with the US and already have women setting up VC funds around. It’s not about who is better, men or women, but about equal opportunities to the capital as well as to sharing general partnership positions in VC funds. All these girls led companies may sound like a hype but believe me, there is no fund that will invest in a startup only because there is female founder, there must be a potential and courage to make it happen. Raising awareness about equal consideration of all genders and minorities in the investment process is happening and is already making a switch form totally biased investment decisions to more rationale and fair to all founders.

Female Founded Venture Capital Funds that you should get familiar with if you are aspiring female VC:

Anya Navidski and her Voulez Capital – Europe’s First VC for Female Founders

Female Founders Fund and their investments in female founders.

Mary Meeker cofounded Bond Capital and just raised $1.25 billion for her new fund.

AmplifyHer Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that is dedicated to supporting outstanding women building businesses with massive potential.

Check Warner as a cofounder of Diversity VC. Here is her talk about her career in VC and why she felt the need to set up Diversity VC and confront some of the industry’s biggest issues.

Aligned Partners run by amazing duet: Jodi Sherman Jahic and Susan Mason.

Urban Innovation Fund headed by Clara Brenner and Julie Lein is aiming to change the cities we see today.

Babel Ventures cofounded by Bá Minuzzi. The fund mainly focuses on HealthTech & BioTech investments in US.

Inspired Capital run by Alexa von Tobel just raised new, $200 mln fund to boost New York startup market.

Halogen Ventures is funding women entrepreneurs and changing the world we all live in. Jesse Draper is founding partner of Halogen Ventures and you may also know her from the TV series The Valley Girl Show.

Glasswing Ventures was founded by Rudina Seseri and the fund focuses on an early-stage AI-powered technology companies.

Fika Ventures focuses on LA and Bay Area based early stage founders solving meaningful, systemic problems through the use of data, related AI-enabled technologies, and automation. Eva Ho is a founding partner and has a great experience with investment into startups as well as in founding ones.

Relentless Venture Fund, healt-tech focused VC, based in Canada and founded by Brenda Irwin. She is a former life science venture capitalist for Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). Prior to launching the Relentless Venture Fund in 2018, Brenda co-founded the angel investment group Relentless Pursuit Partners with Olympian, Simon Whitfield in 2015.

SoGal Ventures was my great inspiration as it the fund was simply founded by 2 women who met at the Stanford VC University in 2015. Pocket Sun and Elisabeth Galbut did not know each other but the passion for creating women support initiatives make them joint the forces and set up SoGal and foundation’s chapters in different cities around the world.

If you need some advice you can always connect with organisations, run by female GPs) that support women and help them breaking into VC world.

AllRise– started by a few well known American female VCs with a mission to help women be successful VCs. They’ve grown exponentially and already helped thousands of women. They organise events, office hours and work to support women that aim to join VC funds, want to set up their own or just work on their startups and try to raise money from the funds own by ‘boys from the club’.

Sutian Dong (Female Founder fund), Jessica Peltz-Zatulove (MDC Ventures) and Bethany Crystal (USV) built amazing global directory that aims to connect Women In Venture Capital. It shows interesting statistics and fact about the VC market globally. You can take a look at the database and extract your own analysis or just jump into the Forbs’ text and see what they found out.

Some more inspirational reads about female founders:

Super thoughtful article about 39 Black Women Investors Inspiring a New Generation of Investors by Jeremy Brown

21 Female Venture Capitalists on Investing, Diversity, and the Value of Independent Thought

Updated on 6th of May.
After receiving so many amazing support messages, I’m adding a few more female founded initiatives you claimed that are missing here. Thanks a lot for your input and yes, I’m sure, there are many more that are doing great things and not so many people know about them yet. That’s the mission, not to be public in the first place but to help single individuals on your way when nobody is watching 🙂

Jane VC invests in Women with BIG ideas 🙂 and it’s good business! Jennifer Keiser Neundorfer and Maren Thomas Bannon are founding partners and they both know what it takes to build and grow the business. They work with the greatest passion and selectively add amazing startups to their investment portfolio.

Forerunner Venture – who champion the companies who rewrite the rules of culture! Kirsten Green launched San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures in 2010 and the Forerunner Ventures, before hitting 10 years, can be already proud of being the investor of such amazing companies as Rent The Runway being most recent Unicorn company in the Valley.

Leadout Capital founded by amazing Alison Rosenthal. The fund just closed with over $27M to invest in pre-seed and seed stage software-driven companies. They want to bring diversity to the VC and founders market and state that you are only as good as your team.

F7 Ventures run totally by women! Kelly Graziadei, Yvette Lui, Robyn Reiss and Joanna Lee Shevelenko started not so long time ago but already making great investments on the market.

Podcasts focusing on female founders and women in VC:

WoVen (Women of Venture) by Canaan is a platform that fosters community and programming for women across the innovation ecosystem. WoVen represents women in venture capital, in venture-backed companies and other adventuresome women in healthcare, tech and business.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-8.png

Voices of Women in Venture by Maddie Callander
A curated playlist of podcast episodes featuring the voices of female leaders in venture capital. Many vc podcasts exist, but so few feature women’s voices. Now you can listen to them here, new episodes added weekly. Image