10/12/2023 0 Comments Venture capitalism meaning![]() Dama Sathianathan, Partner at Bethnal Green Venturesīethnal Green Ventures (BGV) is Europe's leading early-stage tech for good VC, backing ambitious founders using tech to tackle pressing social and environmental challenges at scale. “I also recognize a lot of female and underrepresented founders care deeply about certain social and environmental challenges and therefore we at Simsan partner with communities and accelerators, such as Climate Mosaic and Zinc that address those issues and aim to create maximum impact. Deep tech also improves our lives and democratizes resources and opportunities for all, such as the future of work, fintech, and smart cities. She firmly believes deep tech defines our future and helps solve some of the urgent issues we are facing particularly climate change, healthcare crisis, and supply shortage. The root of the problem, when it comes to why so little funding goes to underrepresented founders, is much deeper, and more needs to be done than “female founders' office hours”,” she explains.Īt Simsan, she aims to engage as many stakeholders to generate the necessary impact to drive the diversity movement and to increase funding to underrepresented founders including women, BAME, and LGBTQ+, according to Bao, “we need to engage with investors who share the same investment thesis, and who are largely from the same community as those founders.” “So I decided to do something about this, which is why I joined Simsan Ventures. However, after meeting more and more female and other underrepresented founders she quickly realized education alone wouldn’t democratize all the opportunities for women as the glass ceiling eventually hits at some point, particularly for female entrepreneurs, including underrepresented founders, during their fundraising journey. ![]() Even after moving to London, she is still involved in education-related projects such as Said Foundation’s social enterprise, BecomeMe School, which provides mentorship for young people. Brianna Bao, Investor at Simsan Venturesīefore moving to London, Bao was one of Math for America’s earliest cohorts in New York City teaching underprivileged kids STEM, with a passion for encouraging young girls to study STEM and getting them interested in the tech industry. ![]() Whilst she is not a big fan of these, she highlights that “we only really started seeing women and BIPOC in board rooms once it became mandatory to include them, so why not do the same for the investment industry.” I couldn’t agree more. Financial innovation is hard, so let’s nurture it rather than regulate it to death and scare people off even talking about money.”įinally, and perhaps controversially, investors and governmental bodies that wield large sums of money should have diversity quotas. “Governments need to make investing in impact easier and more attractive - from investment regulations to tax relief for investors, it should be easier and more beneficial to invest in solutions that are good for people and the planet. ![]() To move the dial, there needs to be a clear path to scale for impactful solutions, one that doesn’t depend on your gender, your ethnicity, or where/whether you went to university. She is adamant we need collaboration along the entire funding ladder - that includes individuals, VCs, corporates, government, and NGOs. Every day, I am blown away by the founders I meet in this space because they have a real love for the problem and their products, they know the communities they are solving for better than anyone else and they all have had to beat the odds in life, which makes them incredibly resourceful and resilient,” she shares with me. have the potential to positively impact one billion lives. “We look for solutions that have the potential to make us, as Tom Husson puts it, “impact billionaires”, i.e. Through her work at Impact Shakers, her thesis has evolved and she now supports underrepresented founders building scalable impact solutions tackling climate change and/or social justice issues.
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