- Version 11 of Europe-wide Feminine Founder Workplace Hours is a key milestone for Europe’s largest diversity-led founder initiative
- This occasion will carry collectively over 300 feminine founders and 170 VCs from among the world’s main funds
- The most recent funding knowledge reveals that over £1.4bn has been raised by corporations which have attended one of many earlier editions
- Since October 2019, Playfair’s workplace hours has delivered over 9,000 mentoring periods for girls founders throughout Europe
LONDON, 8 MARCH 2024:
On Thursday 18th April, 2024, Playfair and 150 of the world’s main enterprise capital funds, together with Atomico, Balderton, Cherry, Headline, Octopus, Partech, Plug & Play, Level 9, Seedcamp, and Speedinvest shall be holding distant workplace hours for greater than 300 feminine founders from throughout Europe.
Shelling out with the necessity for heat introductions and breaking down the boundaries to funding, every founder could have the chance to satisfy 4 buyers over one hour of distant workplace hours to debate their tech thought, search recommendation, pitch for funding or be mentored.
The occasion is being held by Playfair as a part of its long-term dedication to handle the gender imbalance in enterprise funding and can proceed the usage of AI matching know-how. This know-how improves the relevance of founder-to-investor matching, will increase the chance of related conversations and, finally, funding being secured. Each investor taking part within the initiative has pledged to tackle one founder from every version for ongoing mentoring, giving depth in addition to breadth of help.
The earlier ten editions noticed a complete of 9,000 particular person mentoring periods with over 2,000 founders and 200+ buyers participating. So far, 25% of founders have gone on to lift funding after attending an occasion, with latest success tales together with Apoha, Pangea, Carcinotech, Kamma, Hydrogrid, and Materials Evolution. This quantities to £1.4B in whole funding that has been disclosed over the past 5 years.
Chris Smith, Managing Associate at Playfair Capital: “We recognise that there’s no single fast repair in addressing the shortage of funding for feminine founders. We’d like all the ecosystem to play its half and all pull in the identical route. We’re proud that over the past 5 years, our Feminine Founders Workplace Hours initiative has introduced our friends to the desk to ship over 9000 mentoring periods and helped corporations increase over £1.4bn. However the job is way, removed from over.”
Liz Gilligan, Founder and CEO of Materials Evolution, who raised a £15m Sequence A in 2023 commented:
“We met our lead investor — Playfair — by means of an FFOH session. That one dialog over quarter-hour secured our first spherical of funding and since then now we have gone on to lift a £15m Sequence A. Initiatives like FFOH improve the possibilities of connecting with the best buyers to your firm and I’d encourage any lady founder elevating, or interested by elevating, to use.”
For extra info and to make an software to attend the occasion please go to: https://playfair.vc/group.php
-ENDS-
About Playfair
Playfair is a generalist VC fund with a contrarian strategy to pre-seed know-how investing. Primarily based in London, Playfair invests throughout the UK and Europe with an deliberately excessive conviction, low quantity strategy: making 6–8 investments a yr out of its third $70m fund and preserving time, capital and useful resource to assist corporations post-investment. Playfair has backed 70+ corporations since 2013, together with Thought Machine, Andela, Mapillary, Recycleye and Orca AI.
