🔥 Join in the Celebration as Global Invest Her Proudly Shares The First 50 Featured Founders from InvestHer Directory from around the world!

Hi ,

How are you doing? How often do you take a minute to catch your breath and take a minute for yourself? Despite our global slowdown due to the pandemic, it certainly seems like we've all gotten back on that hamster wheel and fast track. At Global Invest Her, we built the InvestHer Directory - the first global directory of companies founded by women, to help give them visibility to potential customers and investors. We used our downtime to keep building.

Today we are proud to share we now have over 1325 women founders from 50 countries and 75 sectors! Over the past few months, we have been featuring a different founder from around the world in this newsletter and on social media and we are thrilled to introduce to our first 50 Featured Founders in this special issue! Check them out below, and be sure to follow them, share about them, buy from them and potentially invest in them! Because you need to See what you can Be.

In this week's newsletter, we also share some great resources for women founders to help them get investor-ready, and you'll also find some interesting articles about what's happening to interest rates, the dip in Asian VC, Europe's Unicorn Drain, the rise of Fund of Funds, and the brand new VC fund from the founders of Innocent Drinks.

Phew! Take a breath and with your favourite beverage in hand, enjoy this special issue!

Wishing you a wonderful week,

Anne

Ask Me Anything - How to Find Investors for Your Startup

Join us for an interactive session to learn about bootstrapping your startup, raising funding through equity crowdfunding, marketing with a minimal budget, building a brand on Clubhouse and more. There will also be networking sessions during the event.

Sama Jashnani is the Co-Founder and CEO at DownToDash (investor-backed), an app to meet people based on activities and engage employees. She has been featured in TEDx, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc and Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch. She also received a full scholarship to study at Warwick Business School for her Masters in Marketing and Strategy.

When the pandemic first hit and the world closed down, we wanted to find a way to help women entrepreneurs stay visible to customers to help them keep their businesses growing and potential investors if they were fundraising. We checked the existing directories of women entrepreneurs around the world and didn't find a truly global, diverse one, that catered to both potential customers and investors and covered more than just a few tech or beauty sectors. So we built one and made it accessible to all and InvestHer Directory was born!

We are proud to share these First 50 fabulous Featured Founders from our Directory, from different industry sectors, geographies and funding stages.

Each founder has been chosen because of their inspiring journey, fierce commitment to their respective causes, devotion to their companies and their unwavering belief in creating something with a lasting impact. They are also in the business of doing business and often seeking capital, and by doing so challenging the VC community to reallocate funding to companies with diverse founders, something data tell us is one of the most difficult yet most rewarding things to accomplish.

Read on here!

🗞 Key Funding News

Fintech Startup Will Finance The Smallest Women-Owned Businesses

As most women-owned businesses have no or fewer than 10 employees, the fact that providing financing to the smallest of businesses—those with no or under 10 employees—is a problem. Some argue it's even an unsolvable one.

The fintech startups that emerged after the 2007-2009 financial crisis are proving that the opposite is possible though. There is s away to advance financial inclusivity and provide easy access to financial services that are useful and affordable for small businesses.

How? Read on to learn more.

Founders Need to Batten Down the Hatches as Interest Rates Rise

On both sides of the Atlantic interest rates are rising. Even though few startups will have significant short-term debt that would be affected by rising interest rates, the changing macroeconomic environment is still something they should understand and prepare for.

If inflation proves tough to control, central banks will be forced to crank rates up higher which will effect startup valuations and put the brakes on broader macroeconomic growth and some economies could tip into recession. There are things founders can do though to mitigate these potential consequences though and this article explains them in detail.

Unicorn Drain: Europe is still Losing its most Valuable Startups to the US

This article covers the journey of a founder, haunted by previous business challenges when trying to start a new endeavour, deciding to try their luck in the US where suddenly previous failures were viewed as badges of honour rather than a stain on their record.

The journey referenced here is symptomatic of what is being labeled as a European Unicorn Drain where data from Sifted reveals similar stories in other countries across the continent as well.

While it might be great for the companies who get access to the lucrative US market, more talent and more capital, some investors and policymakers say that it means Europe misses out on the upside of these companies’ success.

Read on to see if you agree?

💰Investor Insights

Asia Venture Funding Falls After Record 2021

The venture market in Asia is not immune to the decline in funding seen globally.

With a $36.3 billion drop in the he first quarter, which was 7 percent lower compared to the same quarter last year—and a much more dramatic 31 percent dip compared to the last quarter of 2021, according to Crunchbase data, last year was a challenging one in the region.

On one hand, the numbers are not shocking, on the other there is a record year to take into consideration as well.

VC 'Funds of Funds' are on the Rise as Investing Ecosystem Becomes more Complex

Increasing numbers of VCs are launching funds of funds as investors struggle for access, exposure, and diversification.

The concept is not new, funds set up to back a group of other funds. However, what is new, is the sheer amount of potential startups which results in these 'funds of funds' having an upswing.

One of the latest trends is VCs launching their own LP arms to get access to specialised funds and boost their reach and competitive clout, especially in early-stage investments.

Want to learn more about this new complexity? Keep on reading.

💸 Show Me the Money

Innocent Drinks Founders’ VC JamJar Raises £100m Fund

JamJar, the consumer-focused VC firm from the founders of Innocent Drinks, has raised its second fund — and the first to take in institutional capital. Most of the £100m in the new fund originates from the British Business Bank’s (BBB) Enterprise Capital Fund programme (ECF), which invested alongside other institutional investors and JamJar’s partners.

In addition — in what seems to be a growing trend in the VC world — over 30 of JamJar’s portfolio founders, as well as friends and family, invested £2.4m on equal terms to other LPs through a private raise on crowdfunding platform Seedrs.