Business projects launched by female entrepreneurs received less than three per cent of global venture-capital funding in 2018. It’s a shocking statistic that alumni Kamal Hassan, Sc’88, and Helen Vasilevski, Com’92, are determined to change.
They point out that gender-funding imbalance is not only unfair, but also bad business because studies have shown investing in female-led companies is better for the bottom line.
“Women who do get funded tend to achieve better financial returns,” says Hassan, a co-founder of venture capital fund Loyal VC based in Toronto. “This is not just about gender fairness, it is also an opportunity for venture funds to achieve improved results.”
Hassan and Vasilevski are determined to help talented female entrepreneurs overcome financial barriers and achieve their full potential. So, together with Cycle Capital, they have volunteered to bring the global initiative Beyond the Billion (BTB) to Canada, and build a consortium of like-minded venture funds to actively work toward investing in more women-led projects.
The two alumni are now reaching out to venture fund executives in Canada to ask them to pledge funding that each firm will commit to deploy over the next three years toward women-run start-ups. The BTB global team will showcase the firms and selected investments and periodically check in to track pledge deployment.
“We have a problem that we can overcome,” say Vasilevski, who leads flect, a global advisory firm based in Switzerland and contributes to Loyal VC as a VP. “As the data shows that women-led companies do generate higher returns, then actively investing behind these companies will not only minimize the gender-funding imbalance, it will also deliver better results. BTB helps us focus the conversation and our actions at the crux of the matter to rectify the imbalance.”
Venture funds support many innovative startups. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft were all venture-backed technology companies that have changed the world — they were also all started by men. As Hassan and Vasilevski note, it is important to change the funding landscape to give women a better chance to one day develop a product or service that can have an impact on the way people work and live.
In November, Investissement Québec and Teralys become the first Canadian investors to directly support BTB.
Vasilevski wants to bring more members into the consortium and build awareness of the program. She wants to get to the point where when she knocks on people’s doors, she is explaining how BTB is going to change the venture-fund landscape for women, and not simply what the program is.
“We want to make sure that momentum is there,” Vasilevski says. “So, what we're trying to do is start and engage in that conversation, and then help (venture fund executives) to overcome some of the known issues that they encounter.”
