Investing in Female Founders
This month’s edition of our blog alongside NatWest focuses on supporting female founders: We explore the gaps in investing in female founders, the importance of doing so, and highlight examples of good practice.
Investing in Women-led startups, by John Spindler — CEO at Capital Enterprise
The latest data from Pitchbook shows that slightly less than 10% of all VC funding in the UK goes to female led tech start-ups (defined as start-ups with at least one female co-founder). For some reason when you turn the data round and state that over 90% of VC backed tech start-ups have all male founding teams, you get more of the sense of how unacceptable this situation is.
So I thought it would be a good opportunity for us to highlight all the fantastic female-led tech startups that the seed funds I manage and founded (London Co-Investment Fund and AI Seed) have invested in, over the past 12 months, to see if there any patterns.
The 15 tech startups highlighted below are about 20% of all the investments our funds have made, which is better than the industry standard, but still nothing to boast about.
The list shows the full diversity of businesses that women entrepreneurs are founding, from those who are building the deepest tech startups to those using there domain expertise to build a tech enabled business that can disrupt a market.
The female founders below also tend to have previously held senior positions in various industries, and almost a 1/3 graduated from a tech accelerator. Also over 50% of the female founders are original from outside the UK and amongst the Brits there is a good representation of BAME founders, giving me the impression that our amazing female founders are breaking through more than one glass ceiling.
So the female start-up founders we invest in are really, really smart, have domain specific experience, knowledge and insights, are driven to build a world class business, are great to work with, and an inspiration to know. So just like the male founded business we invest in, but dare I say it, probably a little more so.
You decide — here is our list of women founded startups (in no particular order):
1. Lifebit
Founded by Maria Chatzou this deep tech startup is allowing reproducible and easy-to-share genomics analysis in a single click. This Spanish team is a graduate of Techstars and is now building out their business in London.
2. GTN
Founded by Noor Shaker, GTN promises to revolutionise drug discovery by using their patented novel quantum machine learning technology. GTN is a graduate of Entrepreneur First and before co-founding GTN, Noor was an Assistant Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark.
3. Beamline Diagnostics
Founded by Liberty Forman and Katie Willets, Beamline promises to give doctors the technology to never miss a cancer by developing a biopsy triaging system that can identify healthy and benign tissue specimens with high accuracy within seconds. Before starting Beamline, Liberty and Katie studied and secured PhD’s from UCL.
4. Asteroid
Saku Pandirharatne, the sole founder of Asteroid, is building an AI powered game engine for software developers to help them build the next generation of computer games. A Cambridge University graduate who had previously worked at Oculus, Saku has based herself and her company in Silicon Valley.
5. Blue Skies Space
The UCL Professor of Astrophysics Giovanna Tinetti is one of the co-founders, and Chief Scientific Officer, of Blue Skies Space. They are using an innovative business model to build and then launch a satellite into orbit with a telescope and state of the art scientific instruments that can observe deep space and collect data for fellow astrophysicists.
6. Gyana
After completing an MBA at Oxford University Said Business School, Joyeeta Das founded Gyana, a predictive analytics startup that focuses on helping real world retailers and business owners to understand more about their own and competitors customers.
7. Live Better With
Ex-McKinsey partner Tamara Rajah is the founder and driving force behind the tech-for-good startup Live Better With — a platform for people living with long-term conditions around the world to discover everyday practical products and support for their symptoms and side effects. Tamara serves an amazingly brave community of people whilst building an amazing business.
8. Predina
Leverages big data and AI to predict the risk of road accidents, to save lives and reduce the costs of road transport incidences. Edinburgh University graduate Meha Nelson is the co-founder and CTO of Predina and the brains behind Predina’s cutting edge technology.
9. Becoco
Fashion Stylist Katharina Vandamme-Eybesfeld was frustrated with the online fashion shopping experience so she founded a fashion tech startup that is building a Computer Vision based platform for online retailers to improve their personalisation, recommendations and product tagging.
10. MeVitae
Riham Satti co-founded MeVitae, a software platform that will write a recruiting companies job specs, post them to 20+ relevant job boards, shortlist and rank their top candidates, while continuously adapting to the employers personalised hiring needs.
11. Xanview
Regina Shmerlin is Co-Founder of Xanview, an IoT platform for Physical Security. Regina is one of the most dedicated, patient and persistent entrepreneurs we know, and this drive will go into making Xanview, a self declared “Proudly British Company”, a world leader in video surveillance management.
12. Kiroku
Hannah Burrows is a qualified dentist who has worked in practice, hospitals and public health. She joined Entrepreneur First, found a co-founder who is an expert in Natural Language Processing, and founded Kiroku to automate the process of turning conversation into notes for dentists and other health professionals.
13. Tapoly
Janthana Kaenprakhamroy is one of the Top 10 Instruct Female Influencers as ranked by The Insurance Institute and therefore it is no surprised to find she is also the founder of Tapoly, the first on-demand insurance platform for the gig economy in Europe.
14. District Tech
A mobile platform built with some of London’s smartest building owners that allows occupiers of their buildings to connect and use everything they love inside and around their buildings. The founder and startup space expert Vanessa Butz is also working on a number of complex advanced features based on new technologies such as facial recognition, motion sensors, occupancy sensors, and automation (drones, robots), combining advanced mobile user experience with deeply secure hardware integrations.
15. Thread Styling
Sophie Hill the founder of Thread Styling has built from scratch a highly-engaged social media community through beautiful editorial Instagram, WeChat and Snapchat content, featuring the most desirable items the fashion world has to offer. Thread Styling is revolutionising luxury fashion by engaging their target customers directly via chat-based media.
We will not stop there. In 2018 both London Co-Investment Fund and AI Seed are seeking to invest in more amazing female founded tech start-ups.
If that is you, please get in touch.
* The London Co-Investment Fund and AI Seed are separate funds, with different investment criteria and do not formally co-invest together.
The London Co-Investment Fund invests exclusively in Tech start-ups based in London that are raising rounds between £250-£1.5m. The London Co-Investment Fund only invests if one of its 14 co-investing partner VC and Angel Syndicate funds is investing their own money in the round and usually will only invest between 20–25% of the money the start-up is seeking to raise.
AI Seed invests exclusively in AI First Startups. They can be based anywhere in the UK or further afield but must be exceptional technical teams able to build out cutting edge AI/ Machine learning powered software that is able to solve real world customers problems much, much better than any alternative technology or solution. AI Seed invests cheques between £100–500K and will lead rounds.
I am the founder and General Partner in both funds and despite the clear differentiation I spend a lot of my time ensuring that there is no conflict between the funds.
By John Spindler, CEO at Capital Enterprise — London’s startup experts
Must-read articles
A great example of how connecting female founders can help lead the shift towards gender diverse workplaces and entrepreneurship.
- Where are the faces of black female founders, investors and journalists in tech? — Deborah Okenla, YSYS
A focus on the importance of recognising all women, regardless of their sexuality, religion, gender, race and class, in tech.
By Deborah Okenla of YSYS — A thriving startup community for founders, developers, creatives and investors on a mission to make a difference
Events around Female Entrepreneurship
This event by NatWest is an opportunity for women in business to meet business minded people from the local community, to make new connections, and to share challenges faced by female business owners.
Tuesday 22nd May, 10:00–12:00
This event will explore how entrepreneurs can help achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal 5, which is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”.
Fast Forward 2030 is a network and platform of entrepreneurs who believe that in order to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), entrepreneurs need to incorporate them into their business models.
Tuesday 19th June, 19:00–21:00
By Gracie Jones and John Spindler, Capital Enterprise
