Female crypto founders are banding together to unlock the secrets of success in a male-dominated venture capital world.
Bridget Greenwood is the founder of The Bigger Pie, a U.K.-based networking organization that supports women in blockchain globally. She says that even venture capitalists with the best intentions still end up funding male founders at disproportionate rates.
I stumbled over the appalling statistic that of all VC funding [in the U.K.], only 3% goes to female founders, 8% goes to mixed teams, and the rest goes to all-male teams, she explains to Magazine.
And that initial figure has gone down to 1.5% over the pandemic.
In more difficult times, it seems that VCs are falling back on what they know which is to fund male founders. This is doubly frustrating, as research looking at the impact of COVID-19 points to the benefit of feminine leadership during challenging times.
According to data from Pitchbook, the trend is international. Last year in the United States, startups with all-women teams received just 1.9`%, or around $4.5 billion, of the $238.3 billion in allocated venture capital. The 2022 figure was down from the 2.4% achieved the year before.
Seeking to actively change this reversal, Greenwood founded The 200Bn Club with Amber Ghaddar. The initiative takes its name from a 2022 report on female entrepreneurs commissioned by the U.K. government and completed by Alison Rose, CEO of NatWest. A key finding was that investing in female entrepreneurship would add between 200 billion and 250 billion pounds to the countrys GDP.
Bridge Greenwood, founder of The Bigger Pie and co-founder of The 200bn Club.
Greenwood and Ghaddar embarked on a three-month research journey, during which they spoke with academics, investors and VCs. Ghaddar had already successfully raised money for her company, AllianceBlock, so she personally knew some of the struggles.
As Greenwood summarizes, We got two key points from our research. The first is that you need a warm introduction. A lot of the VC world is all about networking, and so we have gathered some 200 VCs to be part of our network so we can create these warm introductions.
The second point is harder to overcome and happens during the pitching process. As soon as it becomes apparent the founder is a woman, then the unconscious bias kicks in.
Pitching stage
Research published in Harvard Business Review singles out the pitching stage as a significant barrier for women. In essence, it says that men are asked promoted questions, whereas women are asked preventative questions which focus on risks and put founders in a defensive position.
Why is this important? Well, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, if you get asked preventative questions, you are five times less likely to raise money, period,” says Greenwood.
However, the good news is that if you understand and recognize a preventative question, you can then learn to answer in a promotive way so that you give yourself a much better chance at success. But this needs to be taught.
At The 200Bn Club, female founders are coached on how to best pitch to VCs, which also includes the somewhat controversial concept of not pitching like a woman.
The abstract from Dont Pitch Like A Girl. (SAGE Publicatications)
While earlier research suggested that investors exhibit bias against women due to their sex, more recent studies have found that the picture is more complicated than that, and that being a female entrepreneur does not diminish interest by investors in and of itself.
A team of Canadian and American researchers conducted an experiment that found investors are actually biased against displays of feminine-stereotyped behaviors by entrepreneurs, whether from men or women. The research, titled Dont Pitch Like a Girl, found that behaviors coded as feminine were associated with negative perceptions about the entrepreneurs business competency.
Now, that doesnt sound any better from a gender studies perspective, but from a practical standpoint, it means female founders can work around the issue by using more masculine-stereotyped behaviors while pitching.
It turns out that while female founders are happy to talk about their team, they are much more self-effacing when it comes to speaking about themselves. And since the VC wants to invest in the leader, this is a damning habit for female founders, Greenwood says.
We work with our female founders to deliver the pitch with confidence, assurance and faith in themselves. And we help them answer the preventative questions in a promotive fashion.
Thessy Mehrain, co-founder and CEO of Liquality, has a background that makes her uniquely positioned to understand the system and how to disrupt it. She spent six years creating products at JPMorgan in the U.S. and joined the Occupy movement after the financial crisis, and it was from there that she discovered Ethereum.
So, I totally fell in love with Web3, but I also didnt want to be part of something that creates technology that repeats what we have in the legacy world, she tells Magazine.
While still working at JPMorgan in 2015, she heard Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, speak at a fintech conference and was blown away by his vision. Shortly after, she jumped ship to ConsenSys and began working on a project to explore swapping between Bitcoin and Ethereum in a decentralized manner without a middleman. That project evolved in time into her startup, Liquality.
It was a great success!
Our first blockchain meetup for women in Tel Aviv was a huge success, with a turnout of dedicated and interested participants. pic.twitter.com/qcot4Wyjwx
In 2016, Mehrain also created the New York-based Women in Blockchain group to help address gender inequality in the sector. The group now boasts 3,000 members.
Working at ConsenSys provided her with great support, access to technology and a co-founder Harsh Vakharia, who also previously founded the startup Etherbit. Coming out of ConsenSys, Mehrain recognizes she had many advantages over other unaffiliated projects.
Thessy Mehrain, co-founder of Liquality. (Photo supplied)
The pair successfully raised $7 million in 2021. When asked if she experienced different treatment as a female founder, Mehrain replies:
How would I know? I was never raised as a man. However, coming out of ConsenSys definitely gave us an edge and warm introductions. It was at that point, during our raise, that I became aware of the dominance of men in this space. At Liquality, we are focusing on the Global South, so we knew from the get-go that we needed to have diverse representation in our funders. That changed our thinking and our outreach.
We knew that diversity makes products more sustainable its not just the right thing to do, its the right thing to do in business terms. We needed to explain that to our investors. But its more than having diversity at the cap table, its what you build afterwards.
Mehrain and her co-founder have assembled a team that reflects the culture in which they want to grow. We work hard at this. Its not an afterthought. For example, we have a female engineering lead and a lot of strong female engineers but that took work.
We are creating a legacy as we go. Its very important so the next generation of women founders and leaders have role models and supports to help them.
A strong corporate background can also help female founders navigate the stormy VC waters. Ayelen Denovitzer was previously with Bain and Revolut, and co-founding Solvo has been her first startup role. She raised $3.5 million led by Index Ventures over just three weeks last year.
Denovitzer did not notice any limitations due to being a woman, but she is also happy to debunk some common urban myths.
Ayelen Denovitzer, co-founder of Solvo. (Photo supplied)
There is this notion that female leaders are more risk-averse and are more emotional when it comes to decision-making, but I think that is largely debunked. Of course, there is unconscious bias, but we are making inroads on those notions too, she tells Magazine, noting that individual differences are much more salient.
I believe it is more down to individuals how we mix. I am much more methodical than my co-founder, which is a me thing rather than necessarily a female thing.
Like Mehrain with Liquality, it was important to her that the VCs at the cap table reflected the projects ambitions. Solvo is a retail-facing financial app that aims to bring the best features of crypto without the complexities and jargon.
So, we needed retail-facing VCs to come onboard, says Denovitzer.
Finding the right fellow co-founders is another element more important than gender. Helena Gagern and Grace Wang, co-founders of Web3 messaging app Salsa, both agree.
We had shared values which was of top importance to us both and similar energy levels, Gagern tells Magazine.
1/ We're SO excited to reveal Salsa. Here is the story of how a chance encounter in Miami led us to build the app where social proof meets web3 messaging. pic.twitter.com/2tbBdi61C9
They bonded over a pilot project during two weeks in Austria, where they learned about passion, energy and pragmatism. They knew they would work together on a bigger project, which turned out to be Salsa, for which they raised $2 million.
We were fundraising in a bear market and initially were looking for $500,000.
However, the co-founders quickly realized that this amount was too little and jumped it up to $2 million which quite possibly ensured their success.
Another element of their success was that they had met their investors in real life at conferences over the past two years. Those warm introductions went a long way to smooth the path to success.
I didnt feel being female was a disadvantage, but I did strongly feel the underrepresentation. This pushed us to approach female VCs as a priority, says Gagern.
Wang tells Magazine that there are a host of benefits to being a female founder. Once you get over the imposter syndrome issue, being a woman can make you stand out in a male-dominated space. All-female teams are rare, and so we pushed this to our advantage. And we also reach out to other female founders helping each other.
From left to right: Helena Gagern and Grace Wang, co-founders of Salsa.
But why the focus on female entrepreneurship? Aside from offering gender equality, there is data that points to female founders achieving better results. According to a study from the Boston Consulting Group, businesses founded by women produce twice the revenue from every dollar in funding than men. Given that they also receive less than half the funding, thats a better bang for your VC buck.
Statistics compiled by Springboard, which helps accelerate the growth of women-led companies, suggest that even a little bit of gender diversity helps and that startups with at least one female founder outperformed all-male founding teams by 63%.
Finally, Mehrain is pragmatic in this gender-balancing game and says men often want to help but just dont know how.
You know, white males are the best allies. Right? Tell them what to do, tell them what is needed. Make them allies and really have them understand how important this is. Then its a win-win for all.
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What are the best metaverse projects that investors should keep on their radar? Cointelegraph Research Metaverse Ranking Awards the top projects
The metaverse continues to expand, with industry giants and upcoming players racing to seize a slice of the potentially trillion-dollar pie. Close to $2 billion was invested in blockchain-based metaverse deals in 2022, according to Cointelegraph Research’s VC database.
A 2022 report by McKinsey estimated the metaverse industry to potentially generate up to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030, an estimate overtaken by Citi's forecast of $8 to $13 trillion. These estimations reflect significant growth from the global metaverse market of $65.5 billion recorded in 2022. To realize these optimistic forecasts, the metaverse industry would need to sustain an impressive 85% compound average growth rate.
VC metaverse funding in 2022. Source: Source: Cointelegraph Research.
Investors will never guess which metaverse won Cointelegraph’s 2023 Ranking of Metaverses. This blockchain-based metaverse has over $61 million in value locked in its smart contracts and over 8,000 monthly users. To learn more about the project that enables true ownership of in-game assets and has a deflationary token model, read the report now.
Yet, the metaverse landscape is not without its difficulties. Market cap losses have plagued industry leaders, with Meta, formerly known as Facebook, losing 77% of its market cap equivalent to $800 billion between late 2021 and 2022. As a result, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, plans to eliminate 21,000 jobs in 2023.
Despite setbacks, industry titans like Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all developing their metaverse strategies. Apple's entry into the metaverse is highly anticipated with its AR/VR headset launch slated for June 2023. Similarly, gaming firms like Epic and Roblox utilized the pandemic lockdown to their advantage, successfully launching metaverse concerts that reached millions worldwide.
In 2022, mergers, acquisitions, and financing in the metaverse realm rose from $13 billion in 2021 to over $120 billion, bolstered by Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision. This deal had a 7.6x EV/Sales multiple and a 20.2x EV/EBITDA multiple. Although valuation multiples are expected to decrease in line with higher interest rates, investment activities remain robust.
Top blockchain metaverse projects are also attracting significant capital. Leading blockchain metaverses measured by market cap include The Sandbox ($1.02 billion), Decentraland ($905 million), and Axie Infinity ($830 million). Year to date (YTD) performance of The Sandbox is 44%. Decentraland’s YTD is 62%. Neither of them surpasses Bitcoin’s YTD retu of 68%.
For investors seeking exposure to the metaverse, ETFs like the Fidelity Metaverse ETF (FMET) and Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (METV) offer viable options. However, the new Cointelegraph Research study reveals that a majority of token transactions in metaverse projects result from speculation rather than actual in-metaverse usage, a trend that calls for cautious investment.
The Cointelegraph Research team
Cointelegraph’s Research department comprises some of the best talents in the blockchain industry. The research team comprises subject matter experts from across the fields of finance, economics and technology to bring the premier source for industry reports and insightful analysis to the market. The team utilizes APIs from a variety of sources in order to provide accurate, useful information and analyses.
The opinions expressed in the article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product.
How a neighborhood-focused Baltimore initiative is employing patience, partnership, and resident leadership to drive long-term change
At the corner of North and Cecil Avenues in Central Baltimore sits the newly constructed home of a community-based organization, Roberta’s House, which…
At the corner of North and Cecil Avenues in Central Baltimore sits the newly constructed home of a community-based organization, Roberta’s House, which provides mental health and grief counseling services to residents who may not otherwise get these much-needed services. The building represents a transformational investment designed to bring new life to a vacant block that was previously occupied by rowhomes.
When construction on Roberta’s House broke ground in 2018, the two sides of Cecil Avenue at this corner were divided, both physically and symbolically. The juxtaposition of abandoned rowhomes on one side and hope rising from the ground on the other side, sparked a thought among staff at Baltimore’s Weinberg Foundation: What if this building were to be the start of a ripple of redevelopment and opportunity in the neighborhood?
And so, the revitalization of this one building on this one corner would soon become part of something bigger—a philanthropic-funded effort to improve the health and life trajectory of Central Baltimore residents. This piece tells the story of lessons from the Greenmount Life, Opportunity, and Wellness (GLOW) Initiative, a new effort to concentrate financial and social investment in select neighborhoods that have long experienced underinvestment.
Developing a hyper-local strategy rooted in strength
Created in 1990, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation had been funding Baltimore-based nonprofits for 30 years when, beginning in 2018 and following many conversations with stakeholders, the foundation adopted a hyperlocal, place-based strategy (while continuing to provide grants across the Baltimore region). The premise was that by focusing some of the foundation’s financial and social capital in a compact geographic area, it could drive positive outcomes in an even more targeted way. Out of this decision came GLOW.
We knew that one of the most important factors in getting GLOW off the ground was choosing the right area on which to focus our efforts. Several factors led to our selection of four Central Baltimore neighborhoods, Midway, Barclay, Harwood, and Greenmount West, including:
Need: Many residents of our target neighborhoods had limited economic opportunity and poor health. Midway, for example, had the highest unemployment rate of any neighborhood in the city, the sixth lowest life expectancy, and one of the city’s highest concentrations of children living in poverty.
Concurrent investment: While Baltimore City, despite decades of disinvestment, had designated the area as one of its “Impact Investment Areas,” other major developments, including a large nonprofit makerspace, were already underway or forthcoming in the area. Meanwhile, a coalition of funders had also recently launched the Central Baltimore Future Fund to catalyze commercial redevelopment. We recognized that GLOW would be more successful if it aligned with those efforts.
Partners: The area also is home to four public schools and many nonprofits, including Central Baltimore Partnership (CBP), a nonprofit collaborative of over 100 organizations dedicated to the revitalization of Central Baltimore neighborhoods. These partners already had meaningful relationships and capacity that if brought together could help achieve more positive outcomes for the neighborhoods around GLOW’s goals.
With all of this in mind, Weinberg Foundation saw an opportunity to improve Central Baltimore’s economic and public health outcomes by working with CBP to physically transform the four neighborhoods, while placing special emphasis on health and educational outcomes for their residents. In this way, the Foundation was able to tap into existing organizational infrastructure—essentially building from strength instead of building from scratch.
Strong and glowing: From an idea to implementation
The central purpose of GLOW is to mobilize and coordinate an array of organizations to improve the health and life trajectory of Central Baltimore residents by improving access to, and utilization of, primary health care, nutritious food, and enriching educational or career opportunities for youth. While the long-term goal is to make an impact on key indicators like unemployment and life expectancy, we know that those will take years. In the interim, we are squarely focused on supporting the initiative as a platform for aligning multiple organizations, sourcing and advancing residents’ goals and desire, lifting up residents as leaders, and attracting additional resources to the neighborhood.
We’ve had some early wins. For example, GLOW has established a network of more than 30 service providers, including a national organization it recruited to the neighborhood, which will connect 125 families with housing, employment, financial, and supportive services that help increase economic mobility. Other wins include expanding paid summer youth opportunities in the neighborhood by partnering with Banner Neighborhoods to operate a YouthWorks site, and catalyzing the development of several key capital projects including an outdoor education and community health hub along with a teaching kitchen. Along the way, we’ve also learned a lot of lessons relevant for any equity-focused place-based initiative, including:
The lead organization for a place-based initiative—CBP in the case of GLOW—must be adept at navigating a range of efforts and stakeholders. Specifically, it must be capable of both strategic and tactical efforts and have trust and relationships with a range of stakeholders, including funders, government leaders, and residents. The organization must focus on strategy at all levels and not get bogged down in the day-to-day of providing services and activities in the neighborhood.
Genuine partnership means more than ‘partners on paper’. Partnership, like collaboration, is a term that gets used a lot and can mean different things to different people. With GLOW, we have found that true partnership requires more than regular meetings or information sharing. It demands building trusting relationships rooted in an “if you win, I win” mentality instead of in the scarcity mindset that often pervades the nonprofit sector, especially when it comes to working with foundations. It means jointly applying for funding, being clear about expectations and roles, and navigating conflict.
Community leadership is as important as community engagement. For place-based initiatives like GLOW, it’s critical that residents not just be engaged in typical ways like surveys or public meetings. Instead, residents should have genuine leadership and decision-making authority— meaning equal or greater representation on the committee overseeing the initiative, with compensation for their time and insights.
Planning takes time and resources. Place-based initiatives require coordinating across city agencies, nonprofit organizations, and resident leaders—as well as including visible wins in early months to build trust and buy-in with residents and partners. This took us two years and required flexibility as the COVID-19 pandemic extended timelines and shifted our attention. Even under normal circumstances planning requires significant staff time to thoughtfully engage residents and stakeholders in small group and one-on-one conversations.
Patience is essential. Place-based initiatives require a long-term commitment due to the nature of developing the infrastructure across sectors to create systemic, long-term change. Phases include understanding the challenges and opportunities in the community, building the infrastructure across multiple partners, and capacity building for anchor institutions—all before achieving neighborhood-level outcomes.
With these lessons in mind, we are continuing to invest in and build GLOW so it can serve as a platform for convening resident and stakeholders to drive change in Central Baltimore for many years to come. By focusing on strategy, building true partnerships, centering residents as leaders, investing in planning, and operating with a sense of flexibility and patience, we believe other funders and community-based organizations can build similar initiatives to help transform underinvested neighborhoods.
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, will present on the latest company milestones at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference on June 8, 4:30pm ET at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. The conference brings together hundreds of public and private healthcare companies and thousands of executives, as well as institutional investors, private equity investors, and VCs discussing trends and investment opportunities in healthcare in the US.
Credit: Insilico Medicine
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, will present on the latest company milestones at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference on June 8, 4:30pm ET at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. The conference brings together hundreds of public and private healthcare companies and thousands of executives, as well as institutional investors, private equity investors, and VCs discussing trends and investment opportunities in healthcare in the US.
Zhavoronkov will share updates on Insilico’s rapidly progressing pipeline of novel therapeutics available for partnering and licensing, and showcase its new AI-driven fully robotic target discovery and validation platform, and end-to-end drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI, which includes target identification (PandaOmics), drug design (Chemistry42), and clinical trial outcome prediction (InClinico). The platform has produced three drugs that have reached clinical trials. Insilico’s lead drug for the devastating chronic lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), the first AI-discovered and AI-designed drug to advance to clinical trials, will soon be entering Phase 2 trials with patients. Insilico’s generative AI-designed drug for COVID-19 and related variants has been approved for clinical trials and has a number of design advantages over existing COVID-19 drugs. Most recently, the company announced that its USP1 synthetic lethality inhibitor received FDA IND approval for the treatment of solid tumors.
There are 31 drugs in Insilico’s pipeline available for partnering and licensing for indications including cancer, fibrosis, and central nervous system diseases, and the Company has nominated 12 preclinical candidates in the past two years, most recently a potentially best-in-class preclinical candidate targeting ENPP1 for cancer immunotherapy and the potential treatment of Hypophosphatasia (HPP).
Insilico has partnered with leading pharma companies, including Fosun Pharma and Sanofi, to accelerate their programs. The Company has raised over $400m in funding to date from notable biotech and tech investors.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, connects biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques to discover novel targets and design novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is delivering breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system (CNS) diseases, and aging-related diseases.
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