One year of gender data at Pi Labs
An update on initiatives and metrics
In 2021, we published a commitment to do more to address the prevalent diversity, equity and inclusion issues in venture capital, while remaining transparent in the process. Two years on, we continue to actively track and share the actions we are taking to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across our team and our portfolio companies.
To coincide with IWD, we’re proud to update you on our progress in terms of the gender gap, a culmination of the initiatives and data collection we started back in 2020. While we recognise that our work here is ongoing, we are encouraged by what this third year of data shows.
Initiatives
We’ve continued to come together as a DEI Taskforce on a quarterly basis.
The taskforce consists of a selection of team members from across the business (with varying levels of seniority) who come together on a quarterly basis to develop and execute various initiatives. Anyone in the business can get involved and have a say. Crucially, it is attended by our three partners, and investment team — meaning it has the highest level of buy-in.
We continue to actively track gender in all of the deals that we’re seeing. This has helped keep us stay accountable and monitor how effective (or ineffective) our various DEI initiatives are. This is, and will continue to be, an ongoing effort.
We ran our annual Female Founder Meetup, bringing together a group of 50+ founders, investors, and advisors from across the startup community to discuss fundraising and facilitate networking. You can read more about this session here.
We continued to focus on equal and fair hiring. Last year was a big year for us in terms of team growth and we continue to work to minimise unconscious bias across our processes, for example by using blind hiring platform (Applied) to assess candidates based on relevant skills rather than based on introductions and CVs (according to research conducted by Applied, 60% of hires made through the platform would have been missed in a traditional CV sift!) We’re excited by the strides we’ve made in this area this year and are focused on efforts and initiatives that will have long-term and sustained impact to the team. You can get to know some of the latest additions to the Pi Labs team here.
Our team proactively seeks out pitch events and accelerator mentorship aimed at supporting female founders. For example, Playfair’s Female Founder Office Hours, Black Tech Fest, WVCE, and Ada Ventures’ events, among others.
We went through a rebrand, culminating with a fresh new look and voice that better embodies our team’s values. A key objective in this process was to create a brand that is friendlier and more human to help us reach and attract a more diverse audience. You can read more about the journey and our new brand here.
The data
While we always want to strive to do better than the industry average, we think its important to reflect on how we stack up against our peers and the wider market:
“Male Founders Continue to Raise the Lion’s Share of Funding Only 9% of announced equity investments went to companies with all-female founding teams in 2022. In comparison, 18% went to mixed-gender teams, and a disappointing 73% went to all-male founding teams. Looking at deal value, 15p of every £1 went to businesses with at least one female founder — compared to 85p of every £1 going to all-male founding teams. On the whole, we’re seeing little year-over-year improvement with respect to the gender gap.”
Source: Wilson Sonsini report.
The data collected by Atomico is even more staggering. It showed female-only teams accounting for just 1% of all capital raised, corresponding to 6% of total deals, while mixed teams captured only 10% of all rounds raised.
Emboldened by this, our team are steadfast on doing what we can to move the needle and we hope to play a key role in increasing funding for underrepresented tech founders over the coming years.
Though our work here is ongoing, we are encouraged by what the below data shows.
Pi Labs — Portfolio
To date, 20% of our total capital allocated went to female co-founded companies (startups with at least one female co-founder). This is up from 14% in March 2022, with 6 female co-founded companies added to portfolio over the past year.
Pi Labs — Growth Programme (Cohort 11)
Last week we unveiled the latest line-up of companies joining our annual programme and announced that 60% of this year’s cohort is made up of female co-founded businesses. That’s up from 33% in 2022 (and 0% in 2021 — something we were determined to learn from and improve on). In terms of companies scouted, of the 938 companies that were reviewed for this year’s programme, 19% were female co-founded (up from 8% in 2021).
Pi Labs — Team
Female representation across the team is 38%, up from 30% in 2022. Last year we were delighted to welcome Stefania onto the team, our first female partner (announcement on this here), as well as a further three female team members onto the investment team, especially since research shows that venture capital firms with female investment partners are four times more likely to invest in female CEOs (Dubow & Pruitt, 2017).
As a firm, we strive to see as many deals as we can, and we welcome all kinds of introductions as well as cold emails for investment consideration. If you are a female founder working on a solution that is transforming how we live, work, own, build, and experience our built world, we encourage you to get in touch. We can offer funding, expertise, support, access to our network or even just a chat. We’d love to hear from you!
If you’re interested in learning more about our initiatives, have feedback to share (we’re always open to this!) and/or your keen to connect over this, please do get in touch directly: sophie@pilabs.vc ✉️
