It is now 2021 and, still, less than 2% of global venture funding goes to female-led businesses. However, female-led businesses across the board have generated 250% greater returns per dollar invested, compared to those led by an all-male team. This begs the question: who is making the funding decisions, why are the facts being ignored, and how do we change the status quo?
At Sie, we have been in the venture ecosystem for 30+ years collectively. We have built and invested in early-stage startups, working across different markets and geographies. And we have seen multiple initiatives, formats, and frameworks developed to support female and under-represented founders, in the US and in Europe. But the numbers are still moving in the wrong direction — funding to female-led businesses has in fact decreased from 2.4% to 1.7% in Europe over the last four years, indicating that something in the system is broken.
For the last three years, all three of us at Sie have been working with female founders on a pro-bono basis, mentoring and hand-holding them through their respective fundraising journeys. Our work has been across multiple sectors, from FemTech and Women’s Health to Construction-Tech and FinTech. We built strong relationships with these founders — ripping their pitch decks to shreds with brutal honesty, preparing them for investment pitches, and adjusting their financial models. All this with the understanding that as a woman, you have to outperform your male counterparts significantly to increase the chances of dispelling unconscious bias. And we succeeded — by opening up our own personal investor networks to these founders and, perhaps most importantly, personally vouching for them within the early-stage ecosystem.
We did our research. We asked female founders what their two biggest challenges are when building a business. 77% of respondents cited fundraising as the biggest challenge. We also asked investors if they wanted to fund more female founders, and 100% responded yes, but ~27% cited it would be difficult to implement in their fund.
And so we built Sie. Sie is a Capital Platform that supports the most promising female founders on their fundraising journey. We match founders to investors from top-tier VC funds (on a voluntary basis) and they work together over a 3-month period to get investment-ready.
We built the platform to scale our personal efforts in helping female founders fundraise, and increase our impact in the ecosystem. Sie’s objective is to cultivate a close rapport between the exceptional founders we select and the mission-aligned investors with whom we match them. We create a safe space for our founders to get the answers they’re looking for, and enable those investors who want to make a difference to be able to do so. We provide resources, community, and network to these founders, and we hope that their mentors become ambassadors for their companies, or even invest in them.
Here’s what we’ve been up to since November.
- We built our website,
- On December 14th, 2020, we launched on LinkedIn with our founding cohort of investors,
- By January 19th, we’d undergone a rigorous selection process, and out of ~100 top-tier startups, handpicked 15 exceptional founders and businesses for our first capital-raising cohort,
- By 28th January, we matched all the businesses to relevant investor-mentors and kicked off Sie’s founding cohort.
Our long-term objective is to change the direction of the trends in capital allocated to female-led businesses. And to normalise being a female founder in high-growth startups raising significant funding, rather than this being the exception. We aspire to make it widely understood that diverse leadership teams beget higher financial returns. And that the archaic, patriarchal practices in the investment and startup ecosystem are no longer welcome in 2021.
If you’d like to find out more about us or get in touch, please visit https://www.sie.ventures/.
And since so many of you asked… Why are we called Sie?
We chose the name Sie because we wanted a word that represents females (our initial focus), but doesn’t exclude. Our long-term vision is to extend the platform to under-represented groups in the founder and investor ecosystem, making Sie — which means so many things — apt for our objective.
In German, sie means:
“she” (nominative feminine singular),
“they” (nominative plural, no distinction between masculine and feminine),
“her” (accusative singular) for a female person (or “it” in English for a feminine thing in German),
“them” (accusative plural, no distinction between masculine and feminine).
It is also the courtesy pronoun for “you”, similar to “vous” in French.
