Sie Ventures Catalyst Program Launches Third Cohort to Level the Playing Field for Female Founders Across Europe
We should all be backing women, people of colour, and other underrepresented groups for a very simple reason — it is the key to create a more equitable and prosperous future and increase the returns on our investments.
Sie Ventures is building a new ecosystem that ensures no more industry-defining investment opportunities are missed because of gender bias.
We continue driving even more capital to female founders through the Sie Catalyst program with personalised support and increased exposure to investor networks, while helping investors get access to the best companies solving the world’s biggest and most complex problems.
Sie Ventures opens its third Catalyst Program to drive more capital to female founders. The program is supported by Silicon Valley Bank, AWS, Citi Ventures, Marriott Harrison.
Applications for Cohort III are now open. If you’re a team with at least one female founder building a pre-seed or seed stage technology startup in Europe and are preparing for your next fundraise, apply here.
Impact To Date
Sie Ventures launched in early 2021 and has since supported 32 companies in its community and program to attract more capital, and work with investors to help them access more diverse founding teams. Since the launch in January 2021, we have spoken with more than 900 companies across Europe, primarily from the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland and Netherlands. We’ve invested in Juno, an educational investment platform for Gen-Z women, Shareback, a first purpose built project delivery and stakeholder management platform, and Jude, a healthcare company breaking the taboo around bladder weakness and incontinence.
Our program companies have raised more than £26M in pre-seed and seed funding over the past year from exceptional investors such as General Catalyst, Localglobe, Portage, InVentures, Octopus Ventures, Ada Ventures, Breega and many more. Our investor network has grown beyond 300+ VCs, angels and family offices.
For Cohort III, we decided to bring on board even more aligned partners to help us fuel the growth of our companies by providing their expertise, resources and guidance by backing Sie Ventures in 2022/2023.
Announcing Sie Ventures Catalyst Program Partners
We have spoken to dozens of potential partners and carefully chosen who we work with: similarly to how we vet our Venture Community, we would like to work with aligned organisations who share our vision to support the best female led companies in Europe. We believe that by expanding the Sie network we can give our founders better access to capital, resources, customers and knowledge as they grow their businesses. We are very excited to announce our Partners for Sie Catalyst 2022/2023: Silicon Valley Bank, Amazon AWS, Marriott Harrison and Citi Ventures.
Find out more what our Partners say here
Working with Top Tier VCs, Angels and Family Offices
Since the day we launched Sie Ventures we have been working with some of the Top Tier VCs who joined Sie Ventures to back female founded teams. We have facilitated more than 500 introductions over the past year. The selection process is simple — we want to work with VCs who don’t just offer lip service but commit capital to diverse founding teams, and are willing to give their time to founders. We have already seen more than 41 checks written from Sie Ventures VC and Angel community, and we are not going to stop here.
Sie’s investor community will always have the first access to Sie companies. We are working closely with our growing community of angels and family offices who can participate in Sie Ventures deals, join Sie Catalyst Program Showcase Days and Founder sessions.
We are looking forward to driving the change alongside our Investor Community and Partners in the coming year. If you want to close the funding gap, invest in more diverse founding teams and help to build tomorrow’s innovations you can join us here.
