👩🏻💻 Flexa Careers Wants to Empower Flexible Workplaces
FemWealth Issue #62
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
Shortly after Molly Johnson-Jones asked her (then) employer for permission to work from home one day per week to be able to manage a chronic health condition, she was let go. While job hunting for a new position, the lack of clarity on companies’ home working or flexible hours policies struck her.
Driven by a desire to bring transparency around flexible work policies, she co-founded Flexa Careers in 2020. The Flexa platform vets and verifies companies’ flexible working policies, to create transparency for job seekers about the workplace’s flexibility-focused culture and benefits.
“The world of work is changing rapidly and we’re seeing people demand more when it comes to how and where they work. Our user numbers have sky-rocketed month on month since launch, as people are no longer willing to put up with inflexible working environments. In a tight labour market, engaged and progressive employers are winning talent by offering more choice and autonomy – these are the companies embracing the Flexa model.”
This week, the London-based startup raised £2.3 million ($2.9 million) in seed funding led by Ada Ventures, joined by investors including Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, angel syndicate HERmesa, and other angels. Check Warner, Partner at Ada Ventures, will join the Flexa Careers board.
“I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to raise this funding, which means we can help more people access the information that they truly care about during their job search, and get more companies Flexified. I’m also really proud that over 50% of our investors in this round are women and I can’t wait to work with this esteemed group to grow the business.” - Molly Johnson-Jones
Read more: Flexa secures £2.30 million Seed investment led by Ada Ventures
Ada’s investment in Flexa - Check Warner explains why her firm decided to back Flexa
Inside the startups bringing more women to the (cap) table
FemWealth Favorites ❤️
💸 Rael Raises $35M in Series B Funding, The Largest Investment in The Feminine Care Category to Date - The Korean-American holistic personal care brand focused on clean period care, intimate care, and skincare, which is co-founded by Yanghee Paik (CEO), Binna Won (CPO) and Aness An (CCO), plans to continue its product innovation and global expansion.
💸 How femtech startup Inne rebooted its hardware launch after COVID-19 chaos - Inne, the Berlin-based startup founded and led by Eirini Rapti, succeeded to rebound after the pandemic shock and has now taken a $10 million extension to the initial $8.8 million Series A round to further develop its fertility and stress monitoring “mini-lab.”
“It is a very early market. I feel that women know that there’s so much they can learn about their bodies and quite frankly we are giving a new angle where we’re like — hey, look, we should be able to track our hormones because [women] have been excluded from research for all those years and if only we had been included we would have known so much more about medication, our bodies, everything around that. So let’s bridge that gap — that’s our mission.” - Eirini Rapti
💸 Planet FWD secures $10M so consumer products industry can track carbon emissions - The carbon assessment startup founded and led by Julia Collins (also founder and CEO of Moonshot Snacks) is on a mission to help the $1.5 trillion consumer products industry more accurately measure and reduce their carbon footprint.
“We are obsessed with helping to decarbonize the consumer landscape and focused on continuing to heat up and fine tune our emissions reductions engine.” - Julia Collins
💸 Ex-Apple execs tap $6.2M for offering a sustainable solution to cosmetics packaging problem - The London-based biotech startup Shellworks, co-founded by Insiya Jafferjee, aims to put an end to single-use plastics starting with the beauty industry.
“Our vision is to break the reliance on the petroleum industry by building a new standard of packaging that is performant, cost-competitive and truly sustainable. We work at the intersection of two ecosystems, the natural and the commercial, and we’re constantly trying to play a meaningful, connected and consistent role in both. The beauty industry creates 120 billion units of plastic packaging annually and we’re committed to providing a scalable solution to tackle this and we’re incredibly grateful that we’ve identified a group of investors who share this vision.”- Insiya Jafferjee
💸 Candor Raises $5M To Build The Next Generation, Authentic Professional Social Network - Founded and led by Kelsey Bishop, Candor, is a professional network that encourages people to share how they work.
“Today, most companies don’t make space for having conversations about work styles and the dynamics of a team. Even from the start of an employee’s relationship with their new team, there isn’t room to open up a conversation about culture and work styles.” - Kelsey Bishop
🍼 Two Women-Led Startups Look To Solve Baby-Formula Crisis With Synthetic Breast Milk - Laura Katz, founder of Helaina, and Michelle Egger, founder of BioMilq are developing synthetic alternatives to breast milk.
“The shortage is showing us how critical it is to drive innovation in this space, to bring more and better access to parents who need to feed their children with something other than breast milk. We’re humanizing infant formula and making it close to breast milk in terms of the properties that breast milk brings to the babies who drink it.” - Laura Katz
VC: 💸 Viola Credit closes $700M fund to provide asset-based lending to fintech startups - The Israeli FinTech startup and alternative credit asset manager co-founded by Ruthi (Simha) Furman provides asset-based lending capital to fintech, proptech and insurtech startups.
💸 Synthesis Capital closed its first fund with $300M, giving boost to food tech’s future - Co-founded by Rosie Wardle, the UK-based VC firm supports startups leveraging high tech to solve global food system challenges across the food value chain.
💸 Soona Amhaz’s Volt Debuts $50M Crypto Fund Backed by Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon - The VC firm founded by Soona Amhaz has closed its second fund focused on infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs and DAOs.
“What we’re investing in thematically are founders who are reimagining systems and the rails that we use to do everyday activities.” - Soona Amhaz
Business: 🙌🏽 The number of women running Fortune 500 companies reaches a record high (Fortune $) - Currently, there are 44 female CEOs at the helm of some of the largest corporations in the US.
💄 What’s next for Glossier as founder Emily Weiss steps down after eight years - Emily Weiss, who is currently pregnant and about to go on maternity leave, has stepped down as chief executive after eight years at the helm of the beauty direct-to-consumer unicorn. She will stay on as executive chairwoman. Kyle Leahy, previously CCO at Glossier will replace her as CEO. Read more here.
“I will always be Glossier’s founder. But, a CEO is the champion that a company looks to, to lead it into tomorrow. From my observation, the greatest companies in the world… make sure that the CEO seat is always filled with the right person to take it where it needs to go for its brightest next chapter.” - Emily Weiss
💸 BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, debuts gender-lens investing (Fortune $)
What I’m Reflecting On
Only 15% of VC general partners in Europe are women - A new report from European Women in VC reveals the low percentage of female general partners at Europe’s VC firms and also that female GPs have less carry than their male peers and fewer seats on investment committees.
What is startup fundraising really like for an ethnic minority founder in 2022? - Features Mursal Hedayat, cofounder and CEO of language training startup Chatterbox, and Alina Bassi cofounder and CEO ClimateTech startup Kleiderly.
“If the people who are in charge of the purse-strings don’t have the same viewpoint as you then they’re not going to see the world through your lens, they’re not going to see the opportunities you spot — and that made the early days much harder.” - Mursal Hedayat
“As an engineer, I had substantial experience in this sector to start off with. But I had a lot of discussions with investors early on [asking]: ‘Why didn’t anyone else do this before you? It really made me question myself at times. If it wasn’t for the impact this can have, and creating something for good, I think I would have struggled to keep going.” - Alina Bassi
Twice as many men as women granted options in company share schemes - A new study conducted in the UK by law firm Boodle Hatfield shows that twice as many men as women are granted options in company shares. The analysis of 33,400 grants of tax-advantaged share options by gender shows that 69% are to men and 31% are to women.
“The gender gap in share options eclipses the gap in basic pay between men and women. Women are missing out on crucial opportunities to build wealth and to build stakes in the businesses they work for. This is bad for our economy and anyone involved in the technology industry. It will lead to fewer female angel investors, fewer repeat female founders and fewer female VCs.” - Check Warner, co-founder of Ada Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in overlooked founders and markets
The Rise and Fall of Wall Street’s Most Controversial Investor - An interesting profile of Cathie Wood, founder of ARK Invest and a rare female portfolio manager. She is known for being bullish on some of the riskiest investments on the market, including cryptocurrency and Tesla.
“A professional who espoused the “to-the-moon” mentality of many amateurs, Wood may now be unintentionally teaching them a valuable lesson: Stocks (and cryptocurrencies) do, in fact, go down, too. There’s a generation of young traders that has yet to experience a true crash in their investing lives — the COVID bear market of 2020, after all, lasted only two weeks — and now, through Wood, has a front-row seat to a bona fide true bear market.”
Thank you for reading FemWealth! 🥰 Wish you a wonderful Sunday and a successful week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth