Register for our women in entrepreneurship event here.
With the start of Women’s History Month today and International Women’s Day coming up next week, we wanted to try and tell an important story—
—You're a talented tech entrepreneur with a vision. You have industry experience, a talented team, a novel idea, and are well-prepared when speaking to potential investors. You have meticulously researched your industry, spent hours trying to understand your customer base, and are ready to change the world with your product. Most importantly, you’re going to scale fast—you have a plan (and a good plan at that!). You've worked so hard getting to this point – why wouldn't investors be falling over each other to hand you the cash?
At this point, we know the answer: only 2-9% of all funds deployed in 2020 to tech startups went to founding teams that included at least one woman (female founders of color receiving an even smaller sliver). Female-led companies are funded disproportionally while male-led companies get a majority of the funding because they’re incorrectly classified as more established and more capable by VCs who look just like them. In the world of traditional startup funding, where most VCs are white men, the bias comes as no surprise.
We’re committing to #BreakTheBias with objective underwriting technology
When your company registers at Capchase and applies for funding, we begin financial analysis to present you with your Capscore™. The Capscore is especially powerful because it helps to #BreakTheBias by taking human opinions and bias out of the underwriting process. It’s 100% data-driven, giving equal opportunity to all businesses and founders. Through our proprietary Capscore algorithm created by our 4 founders, 15% of the capital we provided in the last year was extended to female and minority-led startups (in 2022, we aim to make this number even higher). In contrast, only 2-3% of venture capital deals tend to be extended to female and minority-led founders.
In addition to the Capscore being completely objective, it can also be used as a baseline for your business health, it can help predict trends and blind spots, and it makes the funding process faster by automating heavy thinking through an algorithm. We strive as an organization to deal in transparency, fairness, and speed with our customers, and the Capscore helps guide us in these endeavors.
We have also set aside $100M to ensure that women and minority founders, which have historically received a disproportionately small share of total venture funding, will have equal access to sufficient growth capital.
Highlighting female founders we love working with
Liza Rodewald is CEO of Instant Teams, one of the fastest-growing female-led companies this year, their mission is to connect an untapped market of military-connected professionals to the remote workforce. Instant Teams has been working with our team at Capchase to fund the business line. Their goal eventually is to take the company public, so having that long-term relationship with a programmatic funding source that understands growth and goals is key.
In addition to running a successful company, she’s also a mentor at the Founder Institute and truly passionate about getting more women into tech and business.
“I meet once a month with a few female founders who are just a couple of steps behind me. I think it’s important to mentor people that are relatively close to my path because all those small steps and frustrations are still fresh in my mind. A lot of networks are predominantly men who golf together and it can be hard to break into if you’re not in that circle. So you need to be creative and find ways into networks.”
Looking to the future of female entrepreneurship
While there’s still work to be done to close the achievement, pay, and funding gender gaps, we know that the global economy and business pathos are shifting in favor of women entrepreneurs. Female entrepreneurship powers the global economy and the world is starting to take note:
- 20% of startups have at least one female founder worldwide
- 36% of businesses worldwide are owned by women
- $5B in funding was raised by female founders globally in 2019
- $1.9T revenue was generated worldwide by female-led businesses in 2019
With this emphasis on female entrepreneurship, Capchase offers a new-age solution to growth financing that helps turn recurring revenue into upfront, non-dilutive capital. We work with founders to automate every $ that the business touches, helping to put funding on autopilot and letting founders do what they do best: grow their business (instead of worrying about fundraising).
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Tap into bias-free funding for your business today: Capchase.com/Grow
