Female Founders: Still A Rare Breed in Voice Tech
What 4 years of voice company data tell us and how you can support more gender diversity in C-Suite positions.
Ready to join us in supporting female voice tech founders?
Article by Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek, 2021
As my WiV team prepares for events, we have been looking at the startup ecosystem in voice. I personally have been sending TONS of direct messages to voice founders and C-Suite women about their work.
It’s pretty cool to see all of these amazing startups from around the world, spearheaded by women in Voice. Looking towards the future, it helps to look back at where we’ve been.
My team came across an article by Savina van der Straten Waillet from 2017 which analyzed 164 startups in the voice tech ecosystem at that time. I’ll admit that back in 2017, I was heads-down working on my PhD and running the roads of Tucson, Arizona. I wasn’t yet scoping out the hottest startups and companies in the voice field.
Thanks to the work of der Straten Waillet, we can look back and see some of the ups and downs of the industry.
Is this a complete picture of what happened in the last 4 years? Definitely not, but I wanted to share with you some of the learnings I see in this data set. From the company websites and their LinkedIn presences, this is the highest fidelity we have about the companies apart from calling up the teams. When looking at the online avatars of the people considered as founders or C-Suite people, the pronouns “he/him” or “she/her” were used, but misgendering may have accidentally happened along the way despite best attempts to accurately represent gender identities.
This limitation is acknowledged and the intentions of this research were to consider how we support women and nonbinary folks in voice technology in founding companies and serving in C-Suite positions.
Let’s analyze these 164 companies 4 years later:
Dead or Alive: How many of the companies from the 2017 research are still around?
23% of the startups closed up shop. It is hard to start a company from scratch and this doesn’t surprise me. For these companies, websites and products have been wiped from the internet. For both acquired and closed companies, we have less data about those founding and C-Suite teams. Thus, for the second graph, only the Alive companies were analyzed. What is compelling is that of der Straten Waillet’s data set, 70% of these companies are alive and have web presences today in June 2021. Not bad!
Survivor Bias: Looking at this subset of companies, we do have to acknowledge that we have survivor bias and realize that there are gaps with companies that der Straten Waillet didn’t cover.
Acquisitions: From the rest of the data set, 8% of the startups have been acquired in the last 4 years. One startup went through a major lawsuit with sexual harassment allegations that were extremely well documented.
Female Founder: How many have female founders?
17% have a female founder or co-founder. If there’s no female founder, then 11% have at least one woman on the C-Suite.
And you better believe I’ve pinged these amazing folks to ask them to pitch at Women in Voice Global’s events. Join us!
No Women at the Founder or C-Suite Table: How many have no C-Suite women today? Painfully, 73% of these companies have no women at the decision table- no female co-founder or any C-Suite women. Goodness, that’s a dismal number. Searching through all of these companies and seeing all the faces of team members gives me a stark reminder of how we need to do better.
For this work, I searched “Chief” many many times. I daydreamed about how we can better support female founders and women. How can we help more women become founders and join and stay on the C-Suite?
Have you heard that the exclusive C-Suite networking club Chief that just raised $15 million in funding? An amazing organization and we need more like it.
There are SOOO many amazing female founders I am passionate about. And one has to have hope after seeing such painful statistics.
We just recently saw the IPO of Vimeo and the stellar photos from that bring so much joy with an Indian-American female CEO. Okay, so Vimeo isn’t a conversational AI or voice company particularly, but it definitely made waves.
Two PhD Women Who Keep Killing It: In the conversational AI and bioanalytic sphere, Affectiva just got acquired by Swedish automotive firm, Smart Eye. This startup wasn’t even noted in the der Straten Waillet data set, despite being founded in 2009.
Affectiva was founded by two PhD women and the acquisition deal is a direct result of Dr. Rana el Kaliouby’s phenomenal leadership as CEO. For $73.5 million. Previous co-founding partner of Affectiva Dr. Rosalind Picard has gone on to found another company related to epilepsy and machine learning, Empatica. For her sake, I hope Dr. Picard had a bit of stock left in Affectiva also.
What’s the takeaway from this research? It’s fascinating to see the ups and downs of startup life.
My conclusion is obvious: there’s much more we can do to support female founders and C-Suite women.
Are you ready to join us in supporting them?
Come to our Women in Voice “On the Way Up: Elevator Pitch Events” starting June 17th, 2021, sponsored by Amazon Alexa Startups. Be sure to send the link to your favorite female founder in voice and conversational AI as we’ll be taking more applications for the next 3 events also.
We can’t wait to amplify, celebrate, connect, and empower gender-diverse teams of the future!
Learn more about Women in Voice (501c3) and our Mission at our website:
