Bi-Weekly workshops to empower women and underrepresented genders in venture capital, fostering expertise and equity in funding.
Empowering • Inclusive • Educational • Tranformative
WeInvest is a venture capital for women and underrepresented genders who are looking to expand their understanding of investing careers in venture capital and what it takes to source companies, conduct due diligence, and make a good investment. This program aims to expose our community to the funding world to increase the amount of funding that goes towards underrepresented founders from underrepresented funders.
Less than 3% of all VC funding goes towards women founders, and in 2022, female-founded startups received “just 2% of all venture capital dollars,” as stated by the CEO of All Raise, Paige Hendrix Buckner. Additionally, underrepresented genders account for less than 15% of all check-writers in the United States.
Raising capital is a crucial step in launching a venture, but there is an enormous gender gap in venture funding in the U.S., causing women and non-binary individuals to receive substantially less funding than males. According to Meeta Kapadia, Managing Director at HSBC Innovation Banking, female founders raise $0.38 for every $1.00 raised by a male. Even those who do receive access to funding often face a substantial amount of scrutiny and bias throughout the process. Moreover, in a study done by January Ventures, only 30% of women were optimistic about the environment for women entrepreneurs while 71% of women feel that their gender is holding them back in the investment space. By placing more women and non-binary individuals in these check-writer roles, we can mitigate the effect these gender biases have on investment decisions and allocate more venture funding to under-represented communities.
Through a tight-knit experiential-based cohort and five bi-weekly workshops, WeInvest cohort members will learn topics such as the different funding rounds (Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A and on, IPO, etc.), the wide range of industries and verticals in which firms specialize, and implications the different funding rounds and verticals have on questions asked in founder pitches. At the end of the semester-long program, WeInvestors will have the opportunity to pitch a Boston-based startup they would invest in to the WISE community and showcase all of the skills and knowledge they have acquired.
