On March 23rd, we hosted our first Sie Raise Summit at SVB UK ~ a 1-day event focused entirely on fundraising.
If you’re not yet familiar with the work of Sie, we drive more capital to female founders through our yearly Sie Catalyst program and our Syndicate. The programme equips founders with the tools, network and access to investors, to successfully fundraise. 35 companies have completed Sie Catalyst and raised over £60m with the support of Sie.
The purpose of Sie Raise Summit was to demystify the fundraising process. Here we share some of the learnings from the day as well as some data points we captured from the process.
Purpose
Sie Raise Summit was designed to provide founders with tangible frameworks on key topics, with an immediate opportunity to implement their learnings. The content was highly curated and intentional with multiple formats. For example, Sarah Drinkwater opened the day with the fundamental foundation of any successful fundraise — Storytelling — and invited founders to present their businesses from the start. We ran a speed-networking session straight after lunch to capitalise on fuel and ended the day with fruitful discussions on raising capital from VCs as well as Angel investors.
We asked that every speaker, investor and partner, attend with an open-mind and consideration of every founder, whether that be as an investment, network or commercial opportunity.
Key learnings | Snapshot
- Stories are ‘SEO’ for the mind ~ our favourite soundbite from the day!
- A pitch-deck is to get you the meeting, don’t over-explain
- Manage your investor pipeline like a sales funnel, invest in a CRM or create a process that works for you in Google Sheets
- Knowing the difference between different share options is crucial when negotiating term sheets
- Make sure you do your research on investors and reach out to the right person in the team
- Always personalise a cold-message, avoid a scatter-gun approach
- Avoid paying to people for introducing you to Angels
- Seek out angel syndicates as it’s a great way to get in front of multiple angels who are actively investing
- Make your pitch conversational, not salesy
- Don’t bash competitors ~ rather position your business positively in offering a solution to a specific flaw
- Be honest about what you don’t know and gaps where you need help or how you intend to fill them
- Be open to feedback and willing to provide information when asked ~ there is a reason VCs are asking you and showing interest
- Respect each other’s time — a 10 min intro is not always necessary and can eat into valuable feedback or discussion time
Results
We selected 21 companies to participate and meet 60 investors throughout the day. We have already seen numerous introduction requests from investors and engagement between the founders.
The split between sectors & stage (all applications):
- 22% Future of Work | 15% Healthtech | 13% Consumer | 11% Fintech
- 39% all other categories (i.e AI, Sustainability, AR/VR, Education)
- 55% Pre-Seed | 45% Seed | 8% Series A
- 45% SaaS | 28% Marketplaces | 17% Physical Product | 10% other
Founder Feedback
“It was a higher quality than many other events we have attended”
- There were things I took away from every session and it was refreshing to be in a room with such honesty and energy.
- I didn’t expect the event to be as tangibly useful as it was.
- It was incredibly well run and we took away a lot of valuable information from the sessions that you put together, so we are very appreciative !!
- I’m sure that I speak for all the founders who attended yesterday when I say that it was a truly fantastic day with very important, insightful panels and discussion topics. Hugely beneficial to our purpose! All your panellists and investors are exceptional, and thank you so much for putting together such a great day for everyone.
- The range and depth of yesterday’s discussions really helped me get much better insight into where the problems are the economic environment and hitting start-ups generally….The speed pitching format also worked exceptionally well for me.
Looking ahead
- TLDR: Sie Raise Summit is needed and we’re excited to return in 2024 with a larger event to serve even more exceptional businesses founded by gender diverse teams.
- Women are building businesses across multiple sectors with huge scale potential.
- A special thank you to our brilliant partners, SVB UK who hosted the event and Marriott Harrison & AWS who both led several sessions throughout the day. We could not have done this event with you and look forward to the year ahead!
- We’re opening up applications for our next Sie Catalyst IV in May and we’d love for you to apply (you can already apply since we backtrack all applications). Keep an eye out on our channels or subscribe to our newsletter to hear more!
- If your organisation wants to drive change in the ecosystem, we’re keen to hear from you! We have lots of ideas and learnings from our first Summit that we’d love to implement with the right partners. Feel free to reach out to the team.
