How to diversify your investment opportunities and fund more women founders
To close the global venture funding gap for women-founded companies and drive greater opportunity, we must adjust our existing investment processes.
In the past 18 months, women have been disproportionately impacted by the many challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, including limited access to venture funding. The already significant disparity in global venture capital flowing to women-founded companies became starker during the pandemic, dropping from 13 percent of total venture dollars in 2019 down to 11 percent in 2020, according to Crunchbase’s latest data. While many different factors impact these numbers, we believe the solution is clear: we need to fund and support more women founders.
Helping to close these gaps is a strategic priority for our team at Accion Venture Lab. As a women-led fund with a majority women team, we’re focusing our efforts on both the leadership and workforce level of our gender lens investing strategy.
As one of the first externally facing initiatives of this strategy, Accion Venture Lab hosted four workshops targeting early-stage women fintech founders across Latin America, Africa, and India.