As enterprise Seed investors at Work-Bench, we continue to forge a path for women in enterprise software.
Over the last decade, our Womenterprise initiatives have encompassed data reports and content, and ongoing community events like our Womenterprise Summit to build and support the largest enterprise software community of 2,000+ women.
However, in the U.S., women only make up ~11% of investing partners at VC firms. This disparity significantly impacts funding allocation with only ~13% of VC dollars going to startups with a woman on the founding team. And these numbers drop significantly when looking specifically at those investing in and building enterprise software.
In recent years, we’ve seen a rise – even if only anecdotal – of enterprise and SaaS-focused Pre-Seed firms led by women. We’ve been enjoying getting to know these women and collaborating with them on multiple fronts, and hope this trend continues onward and upward.
So in honor of Women’s History Month this March, we’re excited to highlight seven Pre-Seed firms led by women and investing in the earliest stages of enterprise and SaaS startups:
Array Ventures is led by solo Managing Partner Shruti Gandhi. With 12 exits to companies such as Paypal, ServiceNow, Amazon, Gartner, and JAMF, Array Ventures invests in startups that take advantage of data, AI, workflows across various verticals to set them up for success with hands-on help and access to over 300 C-level experts.
Notable Enterprise Deals: Placer.ai, RadAI, Oro Labs, Shipyard,* and more.
Basecase Capital is led by solo Managing Partner Alana Goyal. She helps technical founders nail their "base case" — recruiting their first engineers, securing their first customers, and raising their first institutional round — and "recurse" onwards. Alana started Basecase while working as a Product Manager at connected operations cloud company Samsara, and has since raised $99M to write the first $1M check into founders at the earliest stages.
Notable Enterprise Deals: Ashby, Baseten, Braintrust, Supabase, and more.
Everywhere Ventures is a global Pre-Seed fund and operator collective. Backed by 500 founders and operators, they are generalists at heart, but lean into three core areas including money, health, and work.
Noteable Enterprise Deals: Cube, Electric, EngFlow and more.
January Ventures is led by Founding Partners Jennifer Keiser Neundorfer and Maren Thomas Bannon, both of whom are operators turned investors. They invest across the US and Europe in Pre-Seed and Seed-stage B2B software startups digitally transforming legacy industries with a focus on work, health, and climate.
Noteable Enterprise Deals: M7 Health, Ethena, Treefera, Unitary and more.
The New Normal Fund is led by solo General Partner Allison Pickens, former Gainsight COO and multi-time board director, including at dbt Labs and Commvault. She leverages her enterprise experience to invest across the modern AI stack and vertical AI applications.
Notable Enterprise Deals: EvenUp, Norm Ai, Adonis, Tennr, Vannevar Labs, DeepL, Jasper, Hex, Hightouch, and others on her Substack.
Sunflower Capital is led by Liu Jiang, a former partner at Sequoia Capital. While at Sequoia, Liu worked with companies across infrastructure, data and machine learning, developer tooling, cybersecurity, healthcare, and hardware (Athelas, Clay, Retool, Semgrep, Tecton, Temporal, etc). Today, she continues to invest in those areas as well as infrastructure modernizing various industries.
Notable Enterprise Deals: dbt Labs, Deel, Hadrian, ReadySet, Vercel, Warp, and more.
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures is led by solo General Partner Ashley Smith, who previously held GTM roles in the early days at Twilio and Parse, and more recently as CMO of GitLab, and Global VP of Marketing at GitHub. She leverages her past experience as a GTM leader in developer and infrastructure companies to invest in Pre-Seed and Seed-stage startups in spaces including, but not limited to, enterprise software, data, infrastructure, security, and developer tools.
Notable Enterprise Deals: Sequin, Toolflow.ai, Argilla, and more.
*Work-Bench portfolio company
**All information was curated from the firms’ websites and Crunchbase as of January 2024.
If you’re an early-stage enterprise founder — connect with us directly to chat about anything GTM or fundraising and check out our events page to stay in the loop on all things happening in the Work-Bench community.
