Wai Germany is creating a network for female founders!
As a common saying goes, ‘only a small fraction of people setting out to build a successful business will succeed’. Starting and managing a successful business is not easy, especially nowadays with fierce competition in every field. However, this sentence is even more valid if the founder of the business is a woman.
The 2020 edition of the Female Founders Monitor (FFM) — a key study on the importance of female founders for the German startup ecosystem — shows that women are heavily underrepresented in the German startup sector (only 15.7% of startup founders) and Berlin is at the bottom of the roster when it comes to the number of women founding startups.
An interesting finding of the FFM is the difficulty to access capital for female founders. In Germany, personal savings remain by far the most common form of funding both for men and women. The differences arise when it comes to business angels and venture capital. Women face clear disadvantages at the pitching stage of the investment process: as shown by a recent New York startup ecosystem study, investors tend to ask women completely different questions than male founders (even if the company’s needs were similar) and where men are usually perceived as courageous and willing to take risks in uncertain situations, women are considered uninformed and naive. These prejudices have a strong impact in terms of external capital accumulation — 42.3% of female-led teams and 56.7% of male-led. The real inequality stands out in the amount of capital raised: only 5.2% of the female-led teams have received 1 million or more compared to 27.8% of male-led teams.
Another striking aspect is that purely male founding teams are still clearly the majority. Only one in ten startups in Germany is founded by an all-female team and two out of ten startups have a mixed founding team. This disproportion has an impact not only on creating barriers to entry for women into the startup ecosystem but also on diversifying the tech scene. Moreover, there are more solo female founders than male founders. This result indicated that women prefer having more freedom to structure the startup exactly as they want to, but it could also indicate a lack of connections and networks in the ecosystem.
This is why Women in AI Germany has decided to launch the accelerator programme — WAIAccelerate. The programme starting in 2021 wants to give women with a startup-idea the necessary tools to go through all the steps to realize it. From workshops to mentoring, we aim to support women in making their company a success from the beginning and bringing more diversity to the startup ecosystem.
Applications will open later this year. Stay informed via https://www.womeninai.co/waiaccelerate and our LinkedIn channel https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/women-in-ai-germany.
To read the full results of the FFM: https://femalefoundersmonitor.de/wp-content/uploads/FemaleFoundersMonitor_2020_EN.pdf
