Purpose

Now more than ever, we need to utilize the untapped economic potential of female founders and co-founders.

We are a performance and data-driven venture capital firm that focuses on companies founded, co-founded or majority owned by women innovators. We believe by pursuing an underfunded opportunity with a targeted approach, we will find pioneering technology and make a difference to the broader challenge of underrepresentation in the industry.

The Merian Ventures Difference

We understand the challenges and disparity of funding female founders.

The challenges are varied but the pattern of underfunding is consistent. It starts with valuation and initial capital raised, and continues with allocation of equity and follow-on funding.

Our experience of working with thousands of women since 2015, backed by recent research, indicate investors treat female founders differently from the beginning. From feedback on pitches to their capabilities as entrepreneurs. A 2017 study published in the Harvard Business Review found that venture capitalists (both men and women) posed different types of questions to male and female entrepreneurs. These unintentional biases can influence the decision making process and do effect the outcome of who receives funding and on what terms.

That fact that women make up 13% of founders is a well-researched and understood problem. Equity discrepancy suggests that female founders’ financial ability to change this reality is limited unless funding and equity allocation is fair from the beginning. If female founders raise less capital at lower valuations, they offer-up more of their equity initially to investors. That changes the likelihood of a founders’ financial success at the onset. The net result is that female founders have limited financial power unless they are funded fully and fairly from the beginning. We want to change the fact that the majority of beneficial outcomes are limited to a few.

In 2019 women made up just 9% of check-writing female investors. We need a more target funding approach like Merian Ventures to ensure the best technology, irrespective of gender or sector, is transparently available to all innovators.