National Women’s Investment Fund Will Support Atlantic Female Entrepreneurs
HALIFAX – The Atlantic Women’s Venture Fund and Calgary investment collective The51 have joined together to create the national, collaborative partnership, Canada51.
“It’s the first time that we’ve really done anything nationwide,” said Rhiannon Davies, AWVF Co-Founding Partner who manages the fund with entrepreneurs Sarah Young and Cathy Bennett.
Canada51’s goal is to increase the participation of women as investors and founders across Canada.
The organization aims to create a positive economic wave on a national scale while reimagining business models and entire industries in the face of the social and economic challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Funding women and funding under underrepresented populations is more important than it was because you see the pandemic having a much, much more negative effect on women and other underrepresented people,” said Davies.
She says women consistently outperform their male counterparts by an average of 63 percent higher increase in company value and deliver higher ROI and higher revenues, yet the gulf in female representation continues.
Canada51’s name was inspired by the reality that while women make up 51 percent of Canada’s population, they received only 4 four of venture capital funding in Canada, and just 2.8 percent worldwide.
“We can invest and put capital behind women innovators,” he said. “It’s building capacity, it’s building networks and it’s giving access, but it’s also putting capital behind them, so actually taking a positive, active, reinforcing move that can make a change.”
Men are encouraged to invest in Canada51, helping to create an inclusive and balanced ecosystem. However, a general qualification of companies with male co-founders looking to invest requires having a woman in a c-suite role for more than a year who owns at least an equal portion in the capitalization table.
“One of the things about coming together is that we have access to each other’s pipeline of female entrepreneurs,” said Davies. “What we find is as we become more and more visible, people start coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘I never saw myself on the other side of the venture capital table and now I’m seeing myself.’ ”