A curated list of resources for female founders
This International Women’s Day we wanted to celebrate female founders by sharing resources, programs and online communities.
Whether you are ready to pitch to investors, want to grow your business or simply want advice on testing and building your early-stage business idea, we’ve curated a list of accelerators, programmes and online communities that can help you with your startup journey.
We also wanted to take a closer look at our own portfolio and showcase the brilliant female founders within our own community – both past and present.
Accelerators for female founders
The Austria-based program helps female-led ventures to become investment-ready. They offer a three-month mentoring program. Applications close 14th March.
A pre-accelerator program for first-time founders. Not exclusive to female founders but well-known for their diversity. Their last batch had 64% of startups with at least one female founder in their team.
This organisation has 40% female mentors to advise entrepreneurs.
Hatch has three programs aimed at female founders: accelerator, incubator and launchpad for three different stages of a company.
TVC is a global female-founded organisation welcoming early-stage to late-stage companies and offers a five-month growth program. Apply by 31st March.
Women Startup Competition is a pan-European incubator program that aims to empower female business at early stages.
The London-based organisation aims to address the under-representation of women in tech. It also regularly runs office hours and events surrounding female entrepreneurship and diversity.
This is a Berlin-based diversity accelerator for female founders. Its German Summer Camp programme teaches founders a variety of aspects of business development.
Groups and communities
London Female Founders group on Meetup
Meetup is a group of female founders building high-growth tech startups. “We’re building a low-touch, high-impact group to empower each other, talk entrepreneurship, commiserate, celebrate, and eat pancakes (in that order. ?) See you at our next meetup!”
Future Unicorns
This group is a slack-based group where you can connect to other founders. “As a Future Unicorns member, you will be able to form strategic partnerships and be clued into valuable branding resources and a variety of informative marketing events.” Join here: https://audreymadden.typeform.com/to/CByNq7
Female funders and female founders
Clubhouse is currently the hottest place in venture and startups. The club ‘Female funders and founders’ brings together women in investing and women in startups.
A community for female entrepreneurs where founders can find support, including mentors, sponsors and female office hours. The community also offers an opportunity for investors to join and coach founders.
Resources for female founders
Femstreet is the go-to female VC, Operator and founder-focused newsletter for women in tech.
Ladies who Launch is a US-based organisation with fantastic resources for female-identifying and non-binary founders. They’ve made it their mission to give females entrepreneurs an “unfair advantage” to starting and growing their business.
Women 2 is a website with resources and written material for funders and founders.
Blooming Founders is a brand that aims to create new opportunities for female founders and enable them to build profitable businesses. They help entrepreneurs by providing practical business education and facilitating access to investors.
European SaaS Companies Founded by Women A CrunchBase list featuring 378 European SaaS companies with at least one female founder in its founding team. Collectively these companies have raised $844M in total funding.
We realise the curated list may have missed some great resources and communities supporting female entrepreneurship across Europe, so if you know of any that should be included here, please do drop us an email at London@nautacapital.com.
Meet Nauta Capital’s female-led startups
Lastly, we could not put this blog together without mentioning the brilliant female founders who have given us the opportunity to partner with them from Seed to exit. Working on solutions from tackling the chaos caused by SaaS, improving intimate well-being, to transforming the retail and primary life-science research market, these founders have created amazing category-leaders in their respective fields.
- Cledara is the all-in-one SaaS purchasing, management and compliance for companies. The startup combines management tools for teams with a payments platform to deliver a solution for dynamic teams working in the subscription economy.
- Co-founder & CEO: Cristina Vila
- Location: London, UK
- Funding: $4.3M
- Emjoy was founded in 2019. The audio-based intimate wellbeing startup has made it its mission to close the orgasm gap by enabling women to discover their bodies and (re)gain confidence in their sex lives.
- Co-founder & CEO: Andrea Oliver
- Location: Barcelona, Spain
- Funding: €3.5M
- Mercaux enables retailers to transform the customer shopping experience by bringing the benefits of digital into physical stores, delivering the speed, convenience, and personalisation of online into the hands of salespeople and customers.
- Co-founder & CEO: Olga Kotsur
- Location: London, UK
- Funding: $7.5M
- MishiPay brings the best of the online checkout experience to physical stores, giving shoppers the ability to scan and pay for their shopping using their mobile phones. Founded in 2015, MishiPay has grown quickly and now serves its scan, pay, leave technology to some of the largest retailers in the world.
- Co-founder & CTO: Tanvi Bhardwaj
- Location: London, UK
- Funding: £5.1M
…and past portfolio
InCrowd – Exit
- InCrowd is the pioneer of the real-time, mobile-first, MicroSurvey solution, delivering the top global 100 life science firms agile, primary market research. InCrowd has access to a 1.8 million “Crowd” of healthcare professionals worldwide, reached in 20 languages. Serving more than 300 brands, InCrowd accelerates market research and time-to-respond to insights to ensure effective brand management and strong brand health.
- Co-founders: Janet Kosloff and Diane Hayes
- Acquired August 2019
As always, if you’re an ambitious b2b SaaS, Enterprise Software or b2b deep-tech early-stage startup in Europe, raising Seed or Series A then feel free to contact us.