The W Fund has one mission – to aggregate capital and deploy funds to women and diverse-led tech startups solving the biggest problems and driving the future of tech.
We’re currently focusing the W Fund on supporting the first batch of startups in our portfolio. While we are not currently looking at new investments at this time, we’d still love to learn more about your company when we open up new investment opportunities.
Please feel free to fill out the form below after reading through our FAQs and investment thesis. If we feel like you would be a good fit for the W Fund, we’ll follow back up with you via email to chat more.
FAQs
Who we fund:
The W Fund is interested in funding founders who are creating technology products for the masses and recognize that consumers are made up of diverse people – women, LGBTQ, and people of different races, ethnicities, ages, nationalities, locations, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
At least 70% of our investments will be in women-led startups. Of that 70%, at least half will go to women who also come from another traditionally underrepresented demographic in the startup space.
The remaining 30% must have one of more of the following features:
— Founder from a traditionally underestimated group, such as race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ socioeconomic background, nationality, age, or location.
— Solution focused specifically on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion.
— Solution focused on serving traditionally underserved customer groups.
Stage of company we fund:
We fund primarily Seed stage companies, and occasionally Pre-Seed and Series A.
What verticals we fund:
While we remain fairly agnostic beyond “tech-enabled”, we do have certain verticals we’re most interested in.
The W Fund is excited about: FinTech, EdTech, Health and well-being, AI and Big Data(with some caveats!), Sustainability and Environmental Tech, AgTech, LegalTech.
We like companies that provide access to groups that traditionally haven’t had any.
You can read more about our Portfolio Strategy here.
What verticals we don’t fund:
Some of the things we’re less excited about: Products that suggest a questionable data and privacy moral compass, Social Media (unless you’ve got the next, non-evil version of Facebook… we’ll take a look at that), HR Tech, AdTech, BioTech, Defense/Cybersecurity.
You can read more about our Portfolio Strategy here.
Investment rate:
We plan to make 2-3 investments each quarter.
Decision processes/Response time:
We work to respond to founder requests as quickly as possible.
Additionally, as part of our process with companies we start due diligence with, we will provide feedback to founders even if we don’t end up investing.
Leading rounds:
The W Fund will consider leading rounds in certain cases, but will not lead a round more than once a quarter.