Happy International Women’s Day! There is a lot to celebrate today as more efforts, organizations, platforms, and networks exist than ever before in supporting female entrepreneurs and founders, and dedicated to enacting change and inclusivity for the VC and tech ecosystem.
However, when we announced our portfolio company Spring Health’s Series B in November 2020 we were reminded of a depressing industry statistic: according to Pitchbook, only 5% of female entrepreneurs go on to raise Series B financings. And according to Fortune, 2020 actually widened the inequality gap, with female founded companies receiving only 2.2% of the year’s total venture capital funding, compared to the 2.6% in 2019.
And if this is all true, then are the numbers for enterprise software (a field where there are historically even fewer female founders) even worse off?
We reviewed the numbers from our own Founders of Enterprise Startups (Who Are Women) Database* and our own internal data analysis proved that there is a significant drop off of female founders from Seed to Series A to Series B (we will be publishing more data on this shortly).
We are thrilled to celebrate their achievements in:
That said, we know there are hundreds of other female enterprise founders who are still working hard to reach this critical financing milestone. If you’re an early stage female founder building enterprise software and looking for a community of peers to discuss building product, securing enterprise customer traction, understanding GTM, recruiting a world class team, or fundraising — we’d love to talk to you here at Work-Bench.
From our #womenterprise Tech Summits to our Women in Enterprise Sales Forums and more, we have seen what a great community can do to help support and raise others up. To us, that is the real meaning behind International Women’s Day — it’s the work we put in the other 364 days that make today matter.
Allison Robinson
CEO & Founder of The Mom Project
Funding: $25M Series B, led by 7GC
What They Do: The Mom Project is a digital talent marketplace and community that connects professionally accomplished women with world-class companies for rewarding employment opportunities.
Amelia Wong
Co-Founder of Alluxio
Funding: $15.5M Series B funding, co-led by Volcanics Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz
What They Do: Alluxio is a developer of open source data orchestration software for the cloud.
Anna-Katrina Shedletsky
CEO & Founder of Instrumental
Funding: $20M Series B funding, led by Canaan Partners
What They Do: Instrumental delivers AI-powered proactive defect discovery, end-to-end failure analysis tools, and remote real-time build monitoring, all in a single simple cloud platform.
April Koh
CEO & Co-Founder of Spring Health**
Funding: $76M Series B, led by Tiger Global
What They Do: Spring Health provides employers with a comprehensive and effective solution for employee mental well-being.
Barr Moses
CEO & Co-Founder of Monte Carlo
Funding: $25M Series B, co-led by Redpoint Ventures and GGV Capital
What They Do: Monte Carlo is a digital data reliability platform designed to monitor and offer alert for missing or inaccurate data.
Bindu Reddy
CEO & Co-Founder of Abacus.AI
Funding: $22M Series B, led by Coatue
What They Do: Abacus.AI does research and offers cloud AI services to help companies of all sizes easily and effortlessly embed cutting-edge deep learning models into their business processes or customer experiences.
Christine Spang
CTO & Co-Founder of Nylas
Funding: $25M Series B, co-led by 8VC and Round13 Capital
What They Do: Nylas provides an API platform that enables developers to quickly and securely access and process user data from any email and calendar.
Christine Yen & Charity Majors
Co-Founders, CEO and CTO of Honeycomb
Funding: $20M Series B, led by e.ventures Growth
What They Do: Honeycomb provides full-stack observability for engineering teams to understand, debug, and improve production systems.
Idit Levine
CEO & Founder of Solo.io
Funding: $23M Series B, co-led by Redpoint Ventures and True Ventures
What They Do: Solo.io connects the world’s applications with APIs from the edge to service mesh.
Jennifer Bisceglie
CEO & Founder of Interos
Funding: $17.5M Series B, led by Venrock
What They Do: Interos is a startup that specializes in providing supply chain risk management (SCRM) solutions.
Laura Spiekerman
Co-Founder of Alloy
Funding: $40M Series B, led by Canapi Ventures
What They Do: Alloy is a developer of an identity verification platform used to detect fraud and make identity management effective and simple for banks.
Rajoshi Ghosh
Co-Founder of Hasura
Funding: $25M Series B funding, led by Lightspeed
What They Do: Hasura is an open-source engine that gives developers instant GraphQL and REST APIs that unify data and power modern applications.
Sandi Lin
CEO & Co-Founder of Skilljar
Funding: $33M Series B, led by Insight Partners
What They Do: Skilljar is a customer training platform for enterprises to accelerate product adoption and improve customer retention.
Shuo Wang
CRO & Co-Founder of Deel
Funding: $30M Series B, led by Spark Capital
What They Do: Deel is a payroll platform used to re-imagine payouts for businesses hiring internationally.
Sophia Baik
Co-Founder of CodeSignal
Funding: $25M Series B funding, led by Menlo Ventures
What They Do: CodeSignal develops an objective automated skills-based assessment platform that can be used as a standard for technical recruiting.
Tina Huang
CTO & Founder of Transposit
Funding: $35M Series B funding, led by Altimeter Capital
What They Do: Transposit develops an online DevOps platform that increases application uptime and improves quality of life for engineers.
Huge thank you to Kira Colburn for her work on this piece.
If there are other female founders who have raised a Series B we have missed here, please reach out and let us know.
*Note: Our Founders of Enterprise Startups (Who Are Women) Database does not include healthcare companies
**Work-Bench Portfolio Company
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