Forrest, Denholm families unite to create more female millionaires

Ms Warren’s comments come as California Governor Gavin Newsom considers whether to sign or veto a bill that would require venture capital firms – many of which are based in the state – to disclose the race and gender of the founders of the companies they fund.

Ms Warren co-founded Aliavia Ventures with Kate Vale in the hope of kick-starting more $1 billion businesses that are founded and led by women after they saw investors retreat from backing female-founded start-ups during the pandemic.

“We saw that firsthand in the market, with capital just drying up literally overnight for female founders across the US and Australia,” said Ms Warren, who is a dual citizen and lives in California.

“Ninety-five per cent of the investors around the world are typically white men, and they retreated back to investing in what they knew because that environment in 2020 was so uncertain,” she said.

In the US, the share of venture funding allocated to female founders peaked in 2019 when companies founded solely by women garnered 2.9 per cent of the total capital invested in venture-backed start-ups in the US.

Locally, the most recent data from Cut Through Venture showed start-ups with at least one female founder collected just 23 per cent of all the VC funds invested this year, and solely female founding teams scored 5 per cent of the total capital invested this year.

In the September quarter, female-founded start-ups secured their largest contributions since the last quarter of 2020. Secure Code Warrior, Silicon Quantum Computing and Goterra represented 87 per cent of the $152 million raised by female founders over the quarter.

Aliavia’s new limited partners join Reserve Bank of Australia board member Carol Schwartz, whose family office Trawalla anchored the fund in 2021, which has already deployed $8.4 million into start-ups. Ms Warren said the decision to start deploying capital immediately delayed the time it took to close the fund.

Ms Schwartz said it was “enormously” frustrating that more money was not allocated to female-led start-ups, but that the tendency of others to overlook those companies had given her an advantage as an investor.

“Investing in women entrepreneurs is such an under-done asset class that I believe I get a competitive advantage through investing in it,” she said.

So far, Aliavia has backed nine female-founded tech start-ups including at-home genetic testing start-up Eugene, online training platform HowToo and AI start-up Othelia.

Ms Vale is a former managing director at Google and YouTube in Australia and New Zealand, and Ms Warren, worked for 18 years in enterprise software sales, including SAP, Microsoft and Workday, and founded female founder-focused accelerator ELEVACAO.

About 50 Australian VCs, including AirTree and Blackbird, have committed to regularly publishing data that reveals their investments in female-led businesses, as part of an initiative spearheaded by Samar Mcheileh the Co-CEO at the VC firm Scale Investors and Giant Leap partner Rachel Yang launched earlier this year.