Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
Sarah Guo, one of the best-known women VC investors and until recently a General Partner at Greylock Ventures, has announced this week that she is launching her own fund.
Guo joined the firm in 2013 and became a general partner in 2018. The second-ever woman partner in Greylock’s five-decade history, she will continue to serve as a board partner.
Guo is one of a growing list of high-profile female VC investors to debut investment funds this year.
“For a Wisconsin-born child of immigrant entrepreneurs, getting to work with startups that have touched billions of people and transformed the world has been extraordinary. And the primary lesson I've taken from the last decade is not of scale, but of speed and leverage: I believe in nothing more deeply than the ability of small groups of open-minded and insanely ambitious people to rapidly change the world.” - Sarah Guo
Read more: Sarah Guo joins the wave of women leaving venture jobs to launch their own funds
Women are leaving VC firms and creating a new class of emerging investors
FemWealth Favorites ❤️
🦄 Lessons From the Newest Unicorn Startup: Be Frugal, and Drink Costco Coffee - Vanta, a data security compliance startup founded and led by Christina Cacioppo, has reached unicorn status this week after raising $100 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion, less than a year after raising its first institutional capital.
💸 New Latino media startup launches with historic $80M raise - Latina activists and entrepreneurs Jess Morales Rocketto and Stephanie Valencia have launched the Latino Media Network with $80 million funding. This is one of the largest capital raises for a Latina-owned and operated startup in the US.
💸 Child care startup Kinside raises $12M Series A in a round led by mothers - Kinside, co-founded by Shadiah Sigala and Brittney Barrett, provides a marketplace of verified carers but also helping parents tap into their flexible spending accounts (FSA) and other benefits to afford care. The round led entirely by mothers, include Sasha McKenzie of Wellington Access Ventures; Joanna Drake of Magnify Ventures; Initialized’s Alda Leu Dennis; and Maven Ventures’ Sara Deshpande.
“Investors are naturally attracted to businesses that are dedicated to solving pain points that they themselves experience or have experienced. This is why representation is so important in the venture world. We didn’t seek out a round of only mothers, but working mothers are acutely familiar with the painfully inefficient process of finding care. They also know how much families spend on care every month so they understand the scope of the financial opportunity.”
💸 Floor announces $8 million in funding to make NFTs understandable and accessible - Christine Brown (formerly Crypto COO at Robinhood) is a co-founder of Floor.
💸 Five to Nine raises $4.25M seed round to help improve the efficiency of DEI initiatives - Co-founded by Jasmine Shells and Denise Umubyeyi, provides attendance and feedback analytics for employee resource groups (ERG) events so companies can measure the effectiveness of their programs.
💸 Gander closes $4.2M seed round to ‘humanize’ online shopping - Founded and led by Kimiloluwa Fafowora, Gander collects and embeds user-generated video content into retail sites so shoppers can see what a product looks like in real life.
💸 Aavia, Known for Its Smart Birth Control Case, Adds $3.7M in Funding - Co-founded by Aagya Mathur, Alexis Wong, and Aya Suzuki is on a mission to change the way people think about their hormones through the use of education, community, and technology.
💸 Nigeria’s Indicina raises $3M to help businesses offer credit to their customers at scale - Indicina is founded and led by Yvonne Johnson.
💸 Nigerian startup Klasha gets an additional $2.1M for its cross-border commerce play - Lagos and San Francisco-based Klasha is led by CEO Jessica Anuna.
💸 Berlin-based remote-team culture-building platform Remi raises €1.2 million in pre-seed round - Co-founded by Valerie Krämer and Rebecca Görres, Remi helps remote teams build culture and connection through a series of daily and weekly team-building activities.
VC: 💸 Biospring Partners Closes Debut Fund with $245 Million of Committed Capital to Invest in Life Sciences Technology Companies - The growth equity firm founded and led by Michelle Dipp, M.D., Ph.D. and Jennifer Lum focuses exclusively on B2B life sciences technology companies.
💸 Why Primetime Partners is betting on the “ageless” population - The US-based firm co-founded by Abby Levy invests in “companies that tackle big issues, like the issue of social isolation among seniors, retirement and financial security and businesses tackling the fact that there are very few products on the shelves that address menopause, which 50% of the population will experience, including 50 million women over the age of 50 in the U.S. alone.”
💸 Sheryl Sandberg a source of inspiration for f7 Ventures’ general partners as they deploy first fund - The early-stage venture firm founded by Kelly Graziadei and Joanna Lee Shevelenko, invests mainly in founders creating technology for the future of work, mental and physical health and connected communities. The firm closed a $50 million debut fund.
What I’m Reflecting On
Let's Use the Work Lessons of the Pandemic to Help New Parents - By Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube
The Girlbosses of Fertility - ‘Fertility coaches sell hope to women struggling to conceive. But can they actually deliver?’
“Not everyone walks away from their fertility-coaching experience unhappy, and coaches often plaster their social-media profiles and websites with glowing testimonials from women who got pregnant or gave birth after seeking their advice. Still, these businesses — which tap a pool of particularly desperate clientele, charge high fees, and offer services of questionable value — raise obvious ethical concerns.”
My Search for the ‘Missed Disease’ - ‘To get diagnosed with endometriosis, you have to say the magic words.’
“People with a uterus have long been told to shut up and put up with pelvic pain from endometriosis, but a few words seem to unlock better care: “I’m struggling to get pregnant.” Many told me they’d experienced this fertility bias, in which the disease is only taken (…)”
Thank you for reading FemWealth! 🥰 Wish you a lovely Sunday and a great week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth
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