Welcome to our #97 weekly newsletter.
“For women taking control of their financial future”
-Jana Hlistova
From The Purse
In this week’s newsletter, we focus on Beyond The Billion, a global consortium of venture capital (VC) funds and limited partner (LP) investors and their recent report, Our First Billion Global Impact Report, assessing the results of their two-year campaign.
The campaign was a bold measure to inspire VCs to pledge to invest in female-founded companies.
This report found that the consortium deployed 61% of their pledged amount in just two years into almost 800 female-founded companies.
We interviewed Shelly Porges, Co-founder & Managing Partner for The Billion Dollar Fund for Women on The Purse Podcast.
We talk about female founders, access to capital, how to close the gender venture funding gap and why female investors are key. Please enjoy!
Don’t forget you can review the news in brief so you stay on top of global financial, economic and investing trends.
As this is the last newsletter from The Purse for 2021, we’d like to wish you a Merry Christmas and all of the best for the New Year.
Thank you for being on this journey with us.
We’re excited about 2022 as we continue on our mission to change the conversation for women about money & investing and support female investors, in not just growing your wealth, but helping to build the world you want to see.
Stay safe everyone & we will be back in early January 2022.
Jana
Beyond the Billion: closing the gender venture funding gap and why female investors are key
Assessing the results of their two-year campaign with Our First Billion Global Impact Report
The gender venture funding gap is real.
Beyond The Billion, a global consortium of venture capital (VC) funds and limited partner (LP) investors have released Our First Billion Global Impact Report, assessing the results of their two-year campaign.
What was the Beyond The Billion campaign?
The campaign was a bold measure to inspire VCs to pledge to invest in female-founded companies. It was the first-of-its kind global capital commitment focused on gender lens investing, as per the Beyond The Billion press release.
This report found that the consortium deployed 61% of their pledged amount in just two years into almost 800 female-founded companies—nine of which were recognised as unicorns, with the remainder expected to be deployed by 2023.
Here are some key takeaways from the report:
In under nine months, 86 funds with assets under management of more than $12bn pledged just over $1bn to be deployed by December 31, 2020. 61% of this capital or over $638m was deployed by December 31, 2020.
Close to 800 companies with female founders received investments. Of these, 69% were mixed gender teams, and 31% were all-female founder teams.
As tracked by PitchBook, a subset of 479 of the women-led portfolio companies of pledged partner funds went on to raise more than $4bn within the timeframe of the pledge campaign (2018-2020). Pledged partner funds also reported investment in nine female-founded unicorns at the time of publication.
This amount was deployed across five regions, including North America $374m+, Europe $121m+ and Asia $82m+.
Key insights include:
LP investors must re-engineer their processes to increase the diversity of their portfolios. LP investment profile constraints such as check size and track record requirements hinder the ability of emerging fund managers to attract capital.
The issues faced by general partners (GPs) mirror the issues of LPs with systemic barriers representing as much of a challenge as personal ones. Fundraising is by far one of the biggest challenges faced by fund managers investing into female founders.
Female founders struggle to raise capital..
…from venture capital (VC) firms, especially if you compare this to all male teams.
This is despite female founder outperformance and their startups exiting earlier at higher valuations per dollar invested.
In fact, funding for female founders declined last year by 3% whilst the overall VC market grew by 16%.
The good news is …
…that we saw a 70% growth in the funding of female founders, in the first nine months of 2021, from the last high in 2019 ie an increase from $23.7bn to $40.4bn, as per the Pitchbook report.
And that compares with a 43% increase for that same period for the overall market which grew from $166.4bn to $238.7bn.
However, the gender diverse teams received approximately $36bn of the $40.4bn, meaning the female founder teams received $4.5bn (only).
Why female investors are key
Shelly Porges, Co-founder and Managing Partner for The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, had this to say on The Purse Podcast:
“Having female investors is critical and a couple of ways. It's critical for the female founders.
…Women check writers are twice as likely to invest in women as male.
Even though, surprisingly in some cases, females have some of the same biases, personal biases against women as the men do. But overall (on average) they are twice as likely to write the checks for women.
So that's very critical to ensure the capital flow goes to worthy female founders.
In fact, in 2021, the number of female check writers in the U S went up by 3.5% since 2019 resulting in 15% of all GP positions at funds in the U S being females. So that's really fantastic. And that helps…”
What next?
Listen to The Purse Podcast interview with Shelly Porges where she also talks about how she started investing as an angel investor and how women can get started.
Listen to The Purse Podcast interview with Eva Pascoe who talks about her experience as a female founder and now as a female angel investor.
News in Brief
Financial news
The US Federal Reserve has decided to end its pandemic stimulus programme more quickly and signals 3 interest rate hikes in 2022, as it reacts to the surge in inflation. (The central bank will taper its asset-purchase scheme by $30bn per month from January).
The European Central Bank (ECB) raises 2022 inflation forecast to 3.2% from 1.7% and raises 2023 inflation to 1.8% from 1.5%. (Sees inflation rate at 1.8% in 2024).
UK inflation soars to a 10-year high at 5.1% (for November) as petrol prices soar.
The Bank of England (BoE) has raised interest rates from 0.1% to 0.25%, the first increase in 3 years.
The BoE will stop the £895bn bond purchasing programme at the end of December.
Crypto: bitcoin, ethereum, DeFi & NFTs
Bitcoin risks correction to $40K-$42K. In the last 30 days, the BTC price has fallen by nearly 17.5%, including a correction from its record high of $69,000 on Nov. 10. (See the current price of bitcoin).
Ethereum dropped back to below $3,900 to end midweek rally (which took it to $4,100 at the start of the week). Ethereum’s price has been between $3,600 and $4,200 so far this week. (See the current price for ethereum).
Bitwise launches NFT-tracking index fund for accredited investors. The Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Index Fund will purchase and hold in custody NFTs from (including) CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Crypto lending firm Ledn (based in Toronto) raises $70m for bitcoin-backed mortgages.
21Shares ETF in Switzerland launches and excludes BTC and ETH. Its largest holding, as of Dec. 13, was binance coin (BNB), with a 31% weighting. Other assets in the index are solana (SOL), cardano (ADA), ripple (XRP), polkadot (DOT), litecoin (LTC), polygon (POLY) and bitcoin cash (BCH).
Valkyrie launches ETF to track bitcoin balance sheet stocks. The ETF is long on MicroStrategy, Square, Tesla and other crypto industry bulls. An actively managed thematic ETF, it steers clear of bitcoin futures, sticking only to equities that invest in the coin.
Sotheby’s netted $100m from NFT sales in 2021. More than 78% of the NFT bidders were new to Sotheby's and over half were under 40, according to Sotheby.
Adidas is launching an NFT collection with exclusive access to streetwear drops.
Billionaire and hedge fund investor, Ray Dalio owns bitcoin and ethereum and has said that he believes crypto has a place in a diversified portfolio.
Millennial millionaires plan to add more crypto in 2022 (according to CNBC survey).
The Purse Podcast

We cover the following in our conversation:
Female founders
Access to capital
Closing the gender venture funding gap
Female investors
and more
Please enjoy! Listen on all podcast platforms including iTunes and Spotify.
Coffee Break? Read This
We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with Jana via the The Purse website or tweet @jointhepurse and @janicka.
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The Purse provides content for informational purposes only, we do not recommend products or services or provide investment advice. Please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor.
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