A FOCUS ON FEMALE FOUNDERS
MARISA WARREN, FOUNDER AND CEO, ELEVACAO; CO-FOUNDER AND GENERAL PARTNER, ALIAVIA VENTURES
“I was quite often the only woman in the room,” says Marisa Warren of working for big tech companies, including Microsoft, SAP and Workday, in Australia and New York since the late 1990s. “There was a boys’ club and the men were helping each other progress up the ladder and, unfortunately, the women weren’t.”
In New York in 2015, she launched Elevacao (Portuguese for “uplift”). “It’s a pre-accelerator, helping women tech founders to get investment-ready.” The company charges a nominal US$495 fee for an eight-week program. “We take women through the fundamentals of raising early-stage funding, from helping them pitch to closing out the investment.”
In 2016, Warren took the program to Sydney, Melbourne the following year and then San Francisco before the pandemic led to a move online. “Now we combine the United States and Australia in the one cohort. We’ve attracted women from all backgrounds, ethnicities, education and ages – from their early 20s to late 60s. We have so many different combinations of women’s life circumstances and going virtual has opened that up even more.”
Australian women who went on to launch successful startups after completing Elevacao’s course include Jenny Barltrop, co-founder and director of HowToo, known as “the Canva for e-learning”, and Manuri Gunawardena, founder and CEO of AI clinical trials finder HealthMatch.
Prepping women was one thing but funding was another. “We had all these brilliant women through our programs – we’ve now had 165 women come through who’ve raised more than US$80 million and we’ve had three exits,” says Warren. “But some of these brilliant businesses weren’t getting funded because of all these biases.” She points to a 2019 Fortune magazine story, which reported that firms founded by women attracted just 2.7 per cent of the total venture capital dollars in the US, yet these startups delivered a 35 per cent higher ROI than all-male-led firms.
Warren and fellow Australian Kate Vale decided to create a fund to back women and, says Warren, take advantage of “all these missed opportunities and make some great returns for our investors”.
In September 2020, they launched California-based Aliavia Ventures. “We have a lot of great investors on board, backing female tech founders across Australia and the US,” says Warren. “The early stage is the most challenging, especially for female founders in Australia.” Among Aliavia’s portfolio companies here are at-home genetics test kit makers Eugene Labs, innovative storytelling tool Omelia and HowToo.
Despite their own considerable credentials in growth – Vale was managing director of Spotify Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), head of sales and operations at Google and head of YouTube ANZ – Warren says they’re still up against the dude bias. “It feels like we have to have a lot more conversations than your average man to get a ‘yes’. I do think that if we were men or even if we had a male on our team, we probably would have raised more by now.”