Funding the Female Founders of the Future: What our First Cohort Achieved in 6 Months

We launched the Sie Capital Platform to drive more capital towards female founders and in our first 6 months our first cohort’s already raised over £10M. And the best part is… we’re only getting started.

With less than 2% of venture capital funding going to female founders across Europe, and that number decreasing over the past 4 years, we knew there was work to be done. We have a vision of an ecosystem where female founders can get relevant fundraising support, get in front of the right investors, and be heard.

When we set out to build Sie, we knew that we wanted to build a solution based on community, education and ultimately funding. But what wasn’t clear to us was what exactly that would look like. Instead of planning and strategising at length, we took the “scrappy startup” route and launched the best version we could think of in less than 3 months.

Was it perfect? Not quite. But did it work? OH YES!!!

Over a 3-month programme and 3 additional months of community support:

• Our founders have received over 115 hours of fundraising support.
• We have facilitated over 320 founder-investor introductions.
• We saw 11 investments from our Venture Community members flow directly into our companies.
• Our Cohort companies have collectively raised over £10.4M to date (mostly pre-seed rounds), and we are targeting £20M+ in total by the year end.

What We’ve Learnt

1. Power is in the Community

We knew that women can be exceptionally collaborative and are generally eager to support one another, but what blew us away was how helpful our community of founders would be to one another. When we first started, we expected education and pitch days to bring the most value, but it transpired that the Founder Community is the glue that holds this all together.

We built our Founder Community during the third wave of the pandemic and we were aware that a purely online format can bring its own challenges. Yet, we saw founders offering one another introductions to some of Europe’s strongest investors (and then raising capital from them!). They also began sharing top resources, contacts and advice to one another and offering their own experiences and advice, without compromise. One of many examples, when an investor pulled out of a round at the last minute, due to unforeseen circumstances, the community offered unbridled emotional support and a new fundraising strategy. She’s now closing her round.

As founders we all need a ‘safe place’ to ask, share and offer support. At Sie, we plan on doubling down on building out our Female Founder Community as we can see how much value this brings — far beyond what we expected.

2. It’s a People Game

During the time of the first cohort, eleven of our Venture Community members invested directly into cohort companies (five funds and six angel tickets). This shows how building these relationships early on and allowing time for investors to get to know the founders behind the companies is one of the key factors to writing the cheques.

In the pre-seed and seed stage, investors want to know who they’re investing in and then what it is they are building. Many of the rounds that we see closing fast are built on relationships that have developed over a given period of time.

Therefore, we encourage founders to start building investor relationships early on, find your sherpa among the investment community, either within Sie or externally.

It’s isolating being a female founder trying to fundraise, and it’s really a game of numbers and mindset. You need to talk to enough investors (personally, over 100) in order to get the round together, and having those conversations are nearly impossible without someone making a warm introduction. The Sie team opened so many doors for me, and opening up their networks to me, to decrypting investor emails is invaluable. We got the same benefit from fellow members of the cohort as well! And on mindset, the Sie team was always there to hop on a quick call or text through questions and how to run the raise, and having regular times to check in and share updates as cohort meant getting support from founders who really understand what you’re going through and help bring ideas to the table. Can I do it again during my next raise?!

Siran Cao, Founder of Mirza

3. No BS Feedback

Founders can get taken for a ride by investors (be that knowingly or unknowingly), so having an objective sponsor among the venture capital community as well as support from other founders, they can navigate these conversations clearly and with conviction. Advice on topics such as: how to structure your raise, what should the valuation for my first round be, and how does that affect my future rounds, the amount to be raised and runway, and the equity sacrifice are all critical discussion points. A lot of mistakes can be avoided very early on.

Too often, investors send blanket feedback such as “it’s too early”. Yet, the only way founders can really improve their pitches and work on their business models is with direct, honest, and detailed feedback.

We hand picked our Venture Community of experienced venture capitalists and exited entrepreneurs because they have seen hundreds of decks and have a strong sector expertise. Either that, or they have gone through the journey themselves. Therefore, they’re best fit to give objective feedback to the new generation of founders.

We hence asked our Venture Community for directness, honesty, transparency and dedication. We aim to provide the same with the Sie team. We truly believe that the Venture Capital ecosystem needs more transparency and this message will be driven home with Cohort II.

I’m a strong believer in initiatives that increase access to information and demystify the fundraising process for entrepreneurs. Sie’s approach of facilitating open, honest and unbiased conversations between investors and entrepreneurs prior to a fundraising event has resonated with me.

Miru Girtu, Investor at Syndicate Room

4. It’s All About the Big Picture

Female founders are renowned for “playing it safe” when pitching. Women often use metrics to sell their story, while men present the big-picture vision. The majority of venture capitalists are looking for extreme outperformers and might simply be unmoved by women’s pitching style.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether women should take on a more aggressive pitching style and “fake it till they make it”, or whether investors should reflect more on what they measure as a good pitch. For example, investors could focus more on the actual performance data from the companies rather than the presentation itself. While we are debating this, the investor ecosystem stands as it is. We at Sie want to support our founders to become the best presenters, to own their stories and numbers, and to gain the confidence required to paint the big picture.

We have decided to incorporate a storytelling session into Cohort II aimed specifically at how female founders can genuinely be themselves while painting the biggest vision of their business.

5. The Term Sheet Comes at a High Price

There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to closing your first round, particularly as a first time entrepreneur. Due to all the unknowns around deal terms and understanding the jargon of the term sheets, you can easily do yourself a disservice while trying to close your first funding round. There’s even more complexity when bringing in investors from the US to European or UK companies, or the other way around — compliance, major investor rights, secondary sales, US securities warranties etc.

The unfortunate truth is that we have also seen extremely high fees and investment terms that aren’t always founder friendly. Whilst we realised that we are not positioned to provide legal advice ourselves, we identified that we need a founder-friendly legal firm to partner with. Based on some research and referrals from our founders, we decided to partner with Marriott Harrison who will join our Cohort II and can provide relevant legal support to our founders and fill this knowledge gap.

What’s In Store For The Rest Of 2021

We are thrilled to have onboarded some new Venture Community members for our Cohort II: Daphne Dovermann from Atomico, Emma Phillips from Localglobe, Marta Pyrzyk from Lightrock, Srin Madipalli, an Angel Investor and former Entrepreneur who exited his company to Airbnb, Yvonne Bajela from ImpactX Capital and Namratha Kothapalli from Frontline. We also continue providing access to our Venture Community members who have supported us throughout Cohort I.

We have carefully chosen our Venture Community members to ensure they are fully committed to dedicating their time to the founders we pair them with, and that they are likewise actively looking to invest in female founders.

We’ve upgraded and improved our program based on all of our learnings from Cohort I and aim to drive even more capital towards female founders throughout 2021.

We’re now on the lookout for 10 exceptional female founders to join the September — December 2021 Cohort.

If you’re a female founder raising your pre-seed / seed round in Q3/4 2021, and think you can benefit from our support, then apply here: https://www.sie.ventures/founders.

We can’t wait to see the impact that the support from our venture community and programme will have on our future founders!