What women build

It’s been nine quarters since we formed XFactor Ventures to invest behind companies with female founders pursuing billion-dollar opportunities. Since our launch, we have invested behind 36 female-founded companies. This works out to be one new investment every 23 days, which, considering all of us on the XFactor investment team are also building and running companies, has kept us busy (and this update long overdue)!

We remarked in the early days of XFactor that our opportunity set and portfolio prove out that there is no such thing as a typically female-founded company, and that is still true. The sector breakdown of our portfolio is shown below:

Example companies in these sectors include Dark and Athena Security in the B2B sector; Tinted and Maude in the consumer sector; Kangaroo Health and BrainCheck in the Healthtech sector; Aliro and Atomos in Deep Tech; RoadSync in Fintech; CourtBuddy in marketplaces; and Chief in community. A full list of our announced portfolio companies is here.

This sector diversity reflects not only the breadth of opportunities female founders are pursuing but also the diverse interests and experiences of our team.

Similarly, we have investing partners in 6 cities across the US (NYC, Bay Area, LA, Boston, Denver, and Seattle), and, as a result, our portfolio calls many cities home. The geographic breakdown of our portfolio is shown below:

On the founding team front, all of our companies obviously have female founders, but 55% of the time, their co-founder is male; 17% of the companies have all-female founding teams; and 28% of the time, they are going it alone as a solo founder. Finally, a third of our companies have a founder with a non-caucasian racial background, and in four out of ten companies, the founder was born outside the US.

All of the statistics above are a long way of saying that female-founded companies span every sector, geography, and mix of team types and backgrounds.

So if you are (or have a colleague that is) a female founder creating something great, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via hello@xfactor.ventures. And, yes, we have invested in companies that have come into us via that email!