Investment Readiness

-Dina Karic, May 2022 In early 2022, the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) started to emerge from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting rising industrial production, exports to the European Union (EU), increases in wages, and credit growth. The region is ripe…

I recently celebrated three years at Connect, the Swedish angel investor network. My job is to coach startups in raising their first pre-seed / seed rounds. In my work I see a clear pattern of three levels of investment maturity among the entrepreneurs. No matter how fantastic your idea or…

“It can be a source of deep frustration,” says Kasonde Kashulwe, manager of Challenges’ Ethiopian office. “When you’re working with a great business, with a superb product and cause, and a compelling vision for their future, but they’re being hampered by an inability to secure investment. …

Here’s a great guest post from our good friend Karen Thomas-Bland on the all-important topic for startups: how and when to form a board — a regular conversation piece at our investment-readiness Entrepreneur Academe sessions. What is a board? It’s worth starting with defining what we mean by a Board…

Well, somehow it’s September and we’ve just held our fifth investment-readiness session of the year, giving women tech founders the opportunity to meet and learn from some of our network of investors — and giving us the chance to take a closer look at some exciting early stage businesses. …

This story was originally published on our sister company Turner Hopkins’ blog. It barely seems believable but this week we launched the fourth year of Entrepreneur Academe — the mentoring programme we run for female founders of tech or tech-enabled start ups. This year we’ve shaken things up a little…

In April we held the second of this year’s Entrepreneur Academe sessions, once again featuring 8 new female-founded and very different tech companies: City Sail is a video profiling artificial intelligence platform which connect employers with candidates on a visual basis. Founder: Yi Xu Connect2Teach is an online network enabling…