The Billion Dollar Fund for Women
It is often said that people vote with their dollars.
It isn’t enough to just have more females represented in investing so long as female founders aren’t getting invested in either. In this week’s blog post I wanted to highlight The Billion Dollar Fund, an organization dedicated to changing this dearth in investment.
In Q3 only 14% of all venture dollars went to companies with at least one female on the founding team according to Pitchbook. Out of the 14%, only 4% went to teams with only female founders.
Enter the Billion Dollar Fund. This initiative aims to gather VC funds to pledge a billion dollars in funding to women and they’ve already gotten over $500M pledged. How much does this impact women?
The average venture capital fund size is roughly $155M according to Pitchbook.
Essentially, The Billion Dollar Fund is equivalent to 6.5 VC Funds pledging ALL their money to women-founded companies.
This effort to gather pledges from VC companies, totaling a billion dollars, is led by Shelly Porges, Sarah Chen, Anousheh Ansari, Anu Jain, Nadereh Chamiou. This internationally-influencing list encompasses an elite group of former executives, founders and leaders of notable companies like Bank of America, LeanIn, UNESCO, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Heck, they’ve even got the first female private space explorer.
It is salient to note that the funds and respective portfolio companies include organizations focused on enterprise software solutions including AI and Blockchain. More of these companies and funds are represented than those in the consumer products and goods sector — disrupting the bias that female founders can only excel in CPG startups.
To read more about the women in VC that are impacting this space, check out my book, Women in Venture Capital. If you’d like to join me in this discussion, please feel free to email me at kjc83@georgetown.edu or connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, you can find my book on Amazon — here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KMHC853
