💸 3 Brand-new Women-led VC Funds
FemWealth Issue #81
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
In the Spotlight 💸
Three brand-new, women-led VC funds were announced this week! 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
Ada Ventures, a London-based VC firm, co-founded by Check Warner, has announced a £36 million “first close” of its second fund. The firm’s portfolio has 28 companies, including Huboo, Organise, MOONHUB, SideQuest and Spill.
With approximately 55% female founders and 30% ethnic minority founders, it is one of the most diverse portfolios in Europe.
The new fund will focus on backing early-stage impact-oriented entrepreneurs in areas such as climate, healthcare and ageing, and economic empowerment.
“We launched ADA because we were pretty frustrated with the way that VC was allocated. We’ve now invested in 28 companies. That fund has performed really, really well. Our Scout network, which was our original innovation that we came up with, has sourced a third of the deals that we’ve invested in. We have a portfolio that's 15 times more diverse than the average U.K. venture fund, and we've got some great emerging winners in that portfolio that have now gone on to raise another 100 million from other funds.” - Check Warner, Founding Partner of Ada Ventures
Sarah Guo, previously a General Partner at Greylock, has announced the first close of a $100 million debut fund for her new US-based investment firm Conviction Partners. She plans to invest in AI startups up to the Series A stage with check sizes between $1 million and $10 million.
Read more: Ex-Greylock GP Sarah Guo Announces Conviction Partners, Her New AI Fund
Sista, a Paris-based organisation behind campaigns to fund female founders has announced the first close of €30m, with a final target of €100m for their debut VC fund.
The fund, co-founded and led by Tatiana Jama, will invest in early-stage startups with at least one woman co-founder, in sectors such as fintech, healthtech, SaaS and consumer. Leetchi’s Céline Lazorthes and La Redoute’a Nathalie Balla, are among the fund’s backers.
“We’ve spent so much time working on the ecosystem and the funding gap that we were like, ‘We’d like to participate as well. We might as well fund all these people.
We want to accelerate a movement that is already here.” - Tatiana Jama, cofounder of Sista
Read more: France’s Sista announces first close of €100m VC fund
FemWealth Favorites ❤️
Startups: 💸 Partake Foods whips up new allergy-friendly products following new cash infusion - The New York-based company, founded and led by Denise Woodard, has raised $11.5 million in Series B funding. The round is one of the largest raised by a Black woman for a food and beverage company in the US.
💸 Highnote launches a collaboration platform for musicians and podcasters offering voice notes, polls and more - The startup co-founded by Paulina Vo allows musicians, podcasters and other creators to collaborate on audio files. It has recently announced its pre-seed funding round of $1.7 million.
🎨 35-year-old Canva founder Melanie Perkins got rejected by 100 VCs. Now her $26 billion design startup is ready to take on Microsoft and Google (Fortune $) - Features Australian entrepreneur Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, the world’s most valuable startup founded and led by a woman. | Also, read The 15 Most Powerful Women in Startups (Fortune $)
👩🏽💻 Female Founders 100. The Top Women Entrepreneurs of the Year
📣 Shout-out to Nneka Nlewoha, co-founder and COO of Canada-based money transfer and currency exchange marketplace, FM Exchange. They are focused on helping newcomers from low-income countries (immigrants & international students) to developed countries send money home, and bring money over to where they live. They are currently raising their seed round. Get in touch with Nneka!
VC: 👏 Melinda French Gates is investing $1 billion of her own money for women in the United States. Here’s an inside look at her game plan - Melinda French Gates plans to invest $1 billion through Pivotal Ventures, an organization that makes investments in for-profit companies, but also gives money to nonprofits, funds advocacy work for women, and partners up with other organizations, with the aim of getting “more power in the hands of more people.”
“To re-create Silicon Valley or to change it would be incredibly hard. But when you’re starting fresh and new, if you start with a model in this perspective, then I don’t think you’ll replicate the old one we had in Silicon Valley.” - Melinda French Gates
Congratulations to Yvonne Bajela for joining Local Globe and Latitude VC as a Partner! 🙌🏼
Business: 5️⃣0️⃣ Introducing The 50 Over 50 2022: Women Stepping Into Their Power In Life’s Second Half - Forbes Women published its second annual 50 Over 50, produced in partnership with Mika Brzezinski and her Know Your Value initiative, featuring 200 dynamic women proving that success has no age limit. Highlights: Meet The Most Successful Female Entrepreneur In American History and Theresia Gouw: The 50 Over 50 Interview
Science:🏅Stanford’s Carolyn Bertozzi wins Nobel in chemistry - Stanford professor of chemistry Carolyn Bertozzi has been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her development of bioorthogonal reactions. Bertozzi is recognized for founding the field of bioorthogonal chemistry, a set of chemical reactions that allow researchers to study molecules and their interactions in living things without interfering with natural biological processes. Also, read Newly minted Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi melds chemistry and biology to advance medicine
Space: 👩🏼🚀 Nicole Mann becomes first Native woman to go to space with latest SpaceX mission - Nicole Mann, a Marine Corps pilot, NASA astronaut and member of the Wailacki tribe of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, headed the latest crewed space mission to the International Space Station as mission commander.
Culture: 🏅Annie Ernaux: ‘Uncompromising’ French author wins Nobel Literature Prize - French feminist writer Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize for her “uncompromising” 50-year body of work exploring “a life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and class”. She is the first French woman and the 17th woman to be awarded the prize since its inception in 1901.
🛼 Michaela Coel on Creativity, Romance, and the Path to Wakanda Forever - Features British-Ghanian actor-writer- director Michaela Coel, who will appear in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the second in Marvel’s Afrofuturist series.
Fashion: 👗 Emma Liu Is Pushing The Boundaries Of The Fashion Industry With ChainGuardians Web3 Metaverse Platform - Features Emma Liu, co-founder of ChainGuardians, a company that is pushing the boundaries of conventional entertainment, media, art and fashion.
“We saw a great alignment of combining the fashion, plus some digital experiences as part of our metaverse strategy. That’s where we started to say, ‘Why don’t we level up this initiative to do phygital with our original intent of just the brand awareness.’ So that’s why for the fashion event, we had the honor to actually attend to showcase not only our entire fashion line in the phygital line, the streetwear; we enhanced it with VR and AR experiences... So seeing our brand IP, not only just walk them on the fashion runway, but also, at the same time, able to have digital experiences to showcase this is the potential of the future where digital models and also digital fashion enhance the Web3 shopping experiences that's coming in the near future.” - Emma Liu
Humanitarian Work: 🇦🇫 Longing for Kabul. Afghanistan’s youngest female mayor opens up about leaving – and returning to – her homeland. - Features Zarifa Ghafari, Afghanistan’s youngest-ever female mayor and a public critic of the Taliban. Read her new memoir, Zarifa: A Woman’s Battle in a Man’s World.
🌻 What happened when this entrepreneur put her startup on hold to help Ukraine, and told VCs to donate - Features UK-based Ukrainian tech entrepreneur Irra Ariella Khi, co-founder of Zamna and the Sunflower Relief NGO.
What I’m Reflecting On 💭
The women behind #MeToo, 5 years later: Tarana Burke, Ellen Pao, and Gretchen Carlson on what has and hasn’t changed (Fortune $) - Five years since the MeToo movement started, the women who played an essential part reflect on how society has and hasn’t changed. Also, read Ellen Pao paved the way for a #MeToo reckoning in Silicon Valley. Now she’s calling out tech’s ‘embarrassing’ lack of accountability (Fortune $)
People Struggling to Get Pregnant Are Turning to Fintechs to Pay for Fertility Treatments - In the US, where most of fertility treatments are not covered by medical insurance, 29% of consumers finance treatments with credit cards.
Hilaree Nelson: An inspiration for women mountaineers - Renowned US mountaineer and extreme skier Hilaree Nelson, who died in the Himalayas last week, was an inspirational figure to a generation of women. During her career she carried out more than 40 expeditions in 16 countries, from the high Himalayas to one of the most remote mountains in Myanmar and Antarctica. In 2012, she became the first woman to climb Everest (8,849m; 29,032 feet) and its neighbour, Lhotse (8,516m), within 24 hours.
“She led expeditions reaching out a hand to the younger generation to follow, showing the ropes, and our future selves got the memo of how to show up as an athlete and human being.
In the most human way, she paved the way and shed a light on everything that we as female athletes aspire to become, by creating a life and career coloured by grace, grit and wild aspirations.” - Maria Granberg, Swedish climber and adventure athlete
Thank you for reading FemWealth! 🥰 Have an energizing Sunday and a successful week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth