💰 Top VC Firms Investing in Female Founders

Thanks Simmie Swil and Nathan Beckford https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathanbeckord_venturecapital-founders-startups-activity-6980954525826252800-WLSu?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

 

In 2021, investments in companies founded by women reached over $30 B for the first time. (VatorNews)

 

But while that may seem like good news, consider this: Female founders secured only 2% of venture capital in the U.S. in 2021, the smallest share since 2016. (Bloomberg)

 

That’s why I wanted to share this list of VC firms investing in women founders.

 

They include:

🔹 The 22 Fund, which invests in tech-based manufacturing companies and intentionally seeks out women and BIPOC-led firms to deliver both high ROI and social/economic impact

🔹 The Artemis Fund, which leads seed rounds for female tech founders modernizing and diversifying wealth

🔹 Coyote Ventures, which focuses on early-stage companies focused on women’s health and wellness (and a favorite Foundersuite customer :)

🔹 The Fearless Fund, which provides pre-seed, seed, and Series A financing to startups led by women of color

...and many more!

 

Interested in seeing the full resource?

 

Just drop a comment below and I’ll pass it along ASAP. 👇

 

Please send a connection request if we are not already connected to get the resource. 📩

 

Nathan Beckord – I help startups raise capital through software, content, and processes

 

#venturecapital #founders #startups #fundraising

 

Sources: VatorNews, BetaBoom, Sifted

Co-Rise - online education raise $8.5m - upskilling the workforce

Founders of Co-rise - Julia Stiglitz, Sourabh Bajaj, and Jacob Samuelson (former Coursera employees - have raised a seed fund of $8.5m from Greylock and Deborah Quazzo at GSV, Greg Brockman, co-founder Open AI, and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder DeepMind.

What it is 

CoRise is an AI-powered online education platform They’ve rethought the experience with a ground-up focus on professional outcomes.

Working with learners from 500+ leading companies over the past year, their approach is showing 10X better than online content-first learning options. To date, 78% of Co-Rise learners have completed their courses. 

The market

CoRise is for everyone who is already working.

The wicked problem 

If you don’t know that there is a worldwide skill shortage for  data engineering and analytics, machine learning, DevOps, and cybersecurity - you have been sleeping under a rock!!

Why people quit - the great resignation 

According to a July 2022 McKinsey study, “lack of career advancement” opportunities is now the number one driver of the “Great Resignation,” 

Strategic workforce upskilling has become not only a prerequisite for an employees growth - but of an organisations growth - and  a key part of diversity and retention strategy as well.

The skills most demanded by businesses, and thus most richly rewarded, are changing ever-faster. 

Our existing educational models such as Universities cannot keep up - the future needs to be a blended Vocational mode 

At a time when university “teaching capacity”  limit the amount of talent flowing into the  tech and AI workforce,” we need more innovation. 

Course completions are at 3-6% and are inapplicable to real-world work. 

How do you fix this? 

• How do you upskill and reskill? 
• How do you transform your workforce ?
• How do you transform analysts into data scientists, engineers into machine learning experts. 
• How do you  transform  traditional infrastructure operations managers into devops engineers?
• How can you serve the massive professional education market, and their even bigger is mission?
• How can you balance motivation and behavior change and offer courses that people want to complete  at an accessible price point in a scalable format?
• How can you get outcomes or results for learners at scale? 
• How can you  have lots of people in a cohort and still have a great experience with customer led training? 
• How can you give an all access pass to a student for $1000? 
• How can you get students to complete assignments with a “nudging infrastructure” or gamification like duolingo?
• How can you scale personalised learning? 
• How can you maintain that personalised element ?
• Can you offer expert-led programming that divides people up into small groups to nurture collaboration and the exchange of ideas - at scale? 
• Can you have standardized courses with bigger classes is the only way to get programming to “be really accessible”?
• How can you make the price point manageable?“Single course access costs an average of $400, and students can buy an all-access pass to every cohort for around $1,000.” For comparison, a single course on Maven – perhaps this one on founder finance – can cost $2,000

The ingredients 

• World-class instructors from cutting-edge organizations teach cohort-based courses organized around practical projects and designed for working professionals

• Communities of practice for social learning and support - where you can collaborate learn and grow together 

• Use of automation and AI to deliver personalization, quality, and outcomes at scale

Competitors 

Udemy, Udacity, Guild Education and, well, her her former employer.

.

Could this be the  magic sauce ? 

CoRise is selling to enterprises in need of more tailored solutions for their talent. In talking to learning and development leaders, the founder learned that organizations are either rolling out asynchronous education platforms to the entire staff, or bringing in consultants to do customer training; “there sort of wasn’t anything in between,” she said, so she built it.

Stiglitz doesn’t want CoRise to scale to a place where it hosts 20,000 courses taught by thousands of instructors. Instead, the startup wants to offer one applied machine learning course that teaches 1,000 or 5,000 students at a time.

“We’re targeting large companies who want to roll out SQL training to 1,000 people, but they’re not going to want to roll out eight different versions of that class. That’s how we get scale.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/28/corises-approach-to-up-skilling-involves-fewer-courses-and-more-access/amp/

https://greylock.com/portfolio-news/upskilling-the-workforce/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=social+share

What makes a good Venture Partner?

Phil Morle of Main Sequence Ventures shares why he is  excited  at having Gabrielle Munzer  become a new Partner 

Gabrielle Munzer leading a session at UNSW Synbio 10x Accelerator program

Here’s the story about how Gabrielle Munzer (“Gabs”) and Main Sequence found each other and arrived at this incredibly exciting moment.

This story begins with a phone call from Square Peg - a warm introduction 

It was from Tushar Roy. He had interviewed a remarkable candidate to join Square Peg Capital but had no open position at the time

This was our first introduction to Gabs, and I remember the call vividly. I learned about a person who began her career in capital markets with the likes of Challenger and Morgan Stanley but always dreamed of a career in venture capital. She spent her ‘downtime’ on maternity leave reading, listening to and watching everything on venture capital.

She came to the call with questions. Questions about every nook and cranny of our work as investors.

Enthusiasm. Curiosity. A point of view throwing itself at ideas to see how it lands.

When we are hiring at Main Sequence, we want something different in each hire. It’s challenging because we don’t know what it looks like until we see it. But when we do see it, it is clear.

We saw it in Gabs. There was a curiosity that lay above any formula or cliche about what it means to be a venture builder.

We hired Gabs as a Senior Associate in 2019.

You can’t learn the craft of venture from a book

Venture capital is an apprenticeship, and this is where blog wisdom crumbles away to leave the real experience of venture building.

It is messy, emotional and risky. Everywhere there is a lesson to be learned, there is a counter lesson.

At Main Sequence, we operate an apprenticeship approach that places the new investor into real experiences. We reflect to learn explicit lessons along the way. Some of this is the technical part of venture capital — valuations, term sheets, cap tables, portfolio construction… Some is the human dimension — empathy, how to be persuasive, how to listen, how to build a thesis that you give a shit about…

Gabs has been in the deep end of all that since she started, forging the instinct needed to back early-stage opportunities.

She rose to Principal in 2021.

So, how do you know a Partner when you see one?

This is a harder question to answer than you might think.

It is easy to say that Partners must have led investments, sat on boards, etc. These are the table stakes. But what does it really take to bring on a new leader for a venture firm?

Here are some things we watched grow in Gabs.

#1 — People go to her for help

At the start of a career in venture it is ‘Push’, but after a while, people come to you if you are valuable. After a while, LPs, founders and co-investors started flowing to Gabs because she could help them.

#2 — She unlocks gnarly problems

Building a venture could be defined as a series of blocks that need to be overcome. Some of them are gnarly and not obvious to solve. Seeing problems fade through targeted introductions, workshops, ideas and products is seeing venture building in action.

#3 — She lands ideas with a heft of experience

It is easy to give advice and send blog posts to help, but there is a difference between an empty comment that keeps people busy and a thought that resonates and sends people away to think and an ability to execute.

You can see people leaning into the latter. Taking notes and following up.

#4 — She creates systems and products that scale the firm

Venture is an artisanal job but a firm needs to be bigger than the individuals within it. Observing a recurring activity that requires excellence to deliver performance and turning it into a product or system many people use is a habit to be fostered.

#5 — Ideas ripple through the community from her initiation

Venture building is making something from nothing. Participating in the creation of something no one thought of before. How do we build momentum that can increase the chance of impact? Some ideas resonate and are carried into execution by others. Some fall onto the ground, never to be picked up. Seeing Gabs command the stage of various events with ideas that spread was another signal

#6 — Trust with money

At its core, venturing is holding other people’s money for a while and then giving them more back. Seeing LPs trust an investor with this is an important signal of Partnership potential.

There comes a moment

At some point, the flow of learning equalises or even reverses. The student educates the teacher. This is the moment that matters to me. Where ideas that were taught have been augmented and refined to become something new. 

Something we all learn from and makes us better.

This is the moment of partnership. This is where we are with Gabs.

I hope you will say ‘Hi’ to Gabs on Twitter.

It’s a river of talent

Gabs is part of the next generation of talent for the Australian venture capital industry. At Main Sequence, she is joined by Jun Qu, Alezeia Brown and Danielle Haj Moussa who are in the flow, building momentum as their own unique contribution to our wonderful world of opportunity.

I am so proud of our team. We all are.

—

🖖🏻 #hack+hustle+flearn

Phil Morle is a deeptech investor and I’m building out loud. Subscribe here or follow him @philmorle

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pmorle_what-makes-a-great-venture-partner-activity-6977734523174227968-_TGL?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

How to Value a startup ⭐️

From my friend Kanwal Rekhi

A VC or PE manager will have to be foolish to overvalue a startup. If any thing, there is a strong tendency to undervalue, to get maximum share of the ownership for the least amount of money. 

This is a free-est of the free market. As a matter of fact it is a wild wild west. Investor and entrepreneurs go through a lengthy negotiation to come up with a mutually agreeable valuation. Valuation depends on many factor: Quality of the team, size of the market, progress to date, competitive position in the market and how many investors are interested in pursuing the deal. Also, public markets form a backdrop under which the valuations are done.

I find it amusing that SBI wants transparency in the process. None is possible. Authorities have to understand that valuations are negotiated and have nothing to do with the balance sheet of the company. It is like an old Indian saying: "Mian Bibi Razee , to Kya Karega Kazee".

Here is the article 

Mumbai: The capital market regulator is taking a close look at how private equityhouses (PE) and venture capital funds (VCF) value the startups and unicorns they bankroll.

A propped-up valuation gives a rosy picture of the portfolio to a fund's investors and paves the way for the fund manager to attract more money from new as well as old investors when it goes for the next round of fund-raising.

Probably driven by complaints from investors and recent reports of opaque accounting of a few unicorns, the Securities & Exchange Board of India (Sebi), in a communication on September 6, asked a large number of funds to disclose their valuation practices and share details like the qualification of the valuer, whether the valuer hired is an associate of the fund or its manager or sponsor, and if there was a significant change in the valuation methodology in the past three years among other things, two persons aware of the matter told ET.

"Sebi clearly wants to understand the credibility of the valuation exercise undertaken by funds," said Richie Sancheti, founder of the law firm Richie Sancheti Associates. According to Tejesh Chitlangi, senior partner, IC Universal Legal, "While the regulator is trying to get a sense on the performance of the AIFs (alternative investment funds), it may also wish to understand the valuation practices prevalent in the industry as the same may vary across funds in absence of any regulatory prescription.

https://m-economictimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/m.economictimes.com/markets/stocks/news/sebi-seeks-details-on-startup-valuation-from-pe-vc-funds/amp_articleshow/94140058.cms

Our Investment Fund - raises $100m in 24 hours

Partners of OIF Fund - Jerry Stesel, Geoff Levy, David Shein and Laurence Schwartz with the support of Isabell Rich, David Cohen, Anna Osipov, Oliver Darwin and Karen Dorfan have raised a 2nd $100m in 24 hours - largely from original investors.

They have kept the fund small so as to spend significant time with their investees.

OIF  have achieved an annual internal rate of return for its first fund of 45 per cent, and 89 per cent for its second fund.

After completing 2  exits and two partial exits to date.

Its first $50 million fund has already been returned to investors multiple times over thanks to 

• selling some of its shares in Assignar and EFTsure,   
• the $US700 million acquisition of XM Cyber and 
• the billion-dollar-odd acquisition of Instaclustr by US cloud tech giant NetApp. 

Scoring a 10X return on funds 

Other businesses backed by OIF include bot mitigation and automated cyber threat protection company Kasada, software company Clear Dynamics, robotics business Advanced Navigation, and people management software company Enboarder.

Source:- Yolanda Redrup  https://www.afr.com/technology/vc-fund-defies-the-downturn-raising-100m-in-24-hours-20220830-p5be14 

Netnada - raises $200k to help sme’s measure sustainability

Climate Action Company NetNada that measures and reports carbon footprint for  SMEs has raised $200,000 in Seed funding from Skalata Ventures

NetNada’s uses AI to automatically assess a company’s data and identify the impact of expenditure on the environment, then suggests the best ways to reduce impact, while also identifying cost savings and automating communications with stakeholders.

Founders Lochie Burke and Afonso Firm wanted to make it super easy for SMEs to act sustainably and make it as important as doing your tax return

Lochie says that business owners want to do the right thing and measure sustainability but don’t know how ! Offsetting carbon, cleaning up supply chains, and searching for green solutions amidst the greenwashing is a minefield for non-experts.”

You can only manage what you measure 

NetNada received an  MVP Grant from the NSW Government, and also took part in the UNSW Founders and CSIRO ON programs. 

David Burt, who ran the ON program before going on to become Director of Entrepreneurship at UNSW, has joined NetNada as an advisor.

Skalata co-founder Darrell Wade is excited about investing as he sees that  carbon accounting will become an essential part of a company’s reporting framework, and Netnada can help them do this.

Source startup daily 

Aussie innovators making global impact

What do bananas, an iron-fortified dairy drink and mass production in metal 3D printing have in common?

Each has been honoured among winners of this year’s KCA Australasian Research Commercialisation Awards for their ground-breaking technology which will help many millions of people globally.

“These awards Celebrate the  commercialisation of research that turns brilliant ideas into products and services to help humanity,” Dr Tim Boyle, KCA Director said.

“Australian and New Zealand research ranks among the best in the world, and each award showcases the absolute finest work performed by research commercialisation professionals to get this research into the hands of businesses and entrepreneurs and so they can build meaningful products that create impact for the benefit society and the economy.”

The winners were announced at the 2022 KCA annual

The Golden Banana project spun out from QUT’s Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy’s and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is close to release a pro-vitamin A fortified banana that will deliver life-saving health benefits to millions of people in Africa - that is resistant to the devastating TR4 disease. Likely to be available for commercial production in 2024, this promises to be worth up to US$25 billion annually.

BUNYAD IRON+, an affordable dairy-based drink fortified with a new source of iron in 2022 helping iron deficiency - a killer in India .  BUNYAD IRON+ has three times greater absorption than alternative sources. The FERRI-PRO technology, originally developed by the Riddet Institute at Massey University, was acquired by Nestlé in December 2018. 

Additive Assurance, a 2019 spin out from Monash University, enables the metal 3D printing industry to undertake mass production with the stringent consistently and reliability tolerances modern manufacturers require. The company does this without the significant downtime or low material yields synonymous with 3D printing. By enabling mass 3D printing, Additive Assurance promises to transform industries from automotive, to aerospace, and even medical devices with specialised, localised, precision production on demand.

Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) hub At QUT has: supported over 700 businesses to develop commercial solutions on 2 years , raised $40 million in additional project funds for industry. ARM Hub and has access to a world-leading network of R&D expertise.

UTS iStrip technology is an ultrasensitive quantitative lateral flow strip (LFS) sensor that uses new generation fluorescence probes to detect the presence of single molecules. This invention helps with the diagnosis of cancers, infections, and cardiovascular diseases, and has been licensed to a number of commercial partners for product development in specific disease categories.

Source https://techtransfer.org.au/aussie-innovators-making-global-impact/