Connecting Female Founders with Female Investors Through Fun

Gitte Pedersen is a scientist/CEO with a mission to cure cancer. Gitte started Genomic Expression together with her brother, Morten Pedersen, after her parents were diagnosed with cancer. The company got off the ground as the diagnostic partner of a $32M “Genome Denmark” project, and she then raised money to establish an independent lab in Boston. Gitte’s dream team to cure cancer has tons of start-up DNA from genomics to commercial launch of drugs. The unpleasant truth is that only one out of four cancer treatments prolongs life. To help rectify this, Genomic Expression finds the best drug for the patient and the best patient for the drug by sequencing RNA, which is like the software of the cell, instead of DNA, which is like the hard disk. RNA analysis can show if a tumor will respond to new immune therapies, which are the only kind of therapy that offer a potential cure. Gitte has a master in Chemical Engineering and worked for Novo Nordisk in a number of positions from R&D to Marketing before she founded Proximity Ventures, an advisory firm that assisted biotech companies in Scandinavia enter the US market was well as the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on attracting investments into the Danish Biotech industry.

Mette Dyhrberg is a health innovator who is changing the way we treat chronic disease and rethinking the delivery healthcare. She is the CEO and founder of Mymee, a digital therapeutics program that reverses the symptoms of chronic autoimmune disease through data analytics and health coaching. Her coaching methods restore quality of life to people who struggled with less than effective treatment plans by the modern medical system. As an authority on autoimmune issues, Mette is a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences such as Stanford Medicine X and Exponential Medicine. Mette holds MS in economics and is a certified health coach. An economist turned diagnostician, she’s the Sherlock Holmes of anamnestic data. She first entered the functional medicine arena in an attempt to tackle her own chronic health issues. In her early twenties, she became severely ill. For years, Mette battled an ever-expanding array of medical diagnoses ending up with six different autoimmune diseases simultaneously. Mette took matters into her own hands, hacked her own health and in doing so, she created a tool that solved her health problems and soon began helping others do the same.

FE = FEmale without MALE, FE symbolizes iron in the periodic table, and FE means “faith” in Spanish and “fairy” in Danish. Gitte and Mette grew up in Denmark, which strives for both financial and gender equality and supports this aim with a phenomenal framework that provides measures such as paid parental leave for both parents and free education and healthcare. In other words EQUALITY is in our DNA. We managed to take our companies to where we are now by ignoring the inequality. However, with the latest political developments and recent reports suggesting that women do not receive the same level of funding as men, that’s clearly a problem we need to correct. Female Equity aims to do just that by creating a strong network of women who will support each other.

Madeleine Albright is an American politician and diplomat. She is the first woman to have become the US Secretary of State. She served from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Because she was an immigrant, she was not eligible to be a U.S. presidential successor, and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Middle East. Albright supported Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign. While introducing Clinton at a campaign event in New Hampshire ahead of that state’s primary, Albright said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

Natalia Oberti Noguera is an amazing women who single handedly took upon her to change the fact that most women do not angel invest. Her thesis was that if she could teach women to invest in other women then we could change the landscape. Pipeline Angels now has 50 portfolio companies and 400 female angel investors. That is powerful. There are now several networks and incubators as well as VC funds that focus on female entrepreneurs and its our goal to establish and build out those network.
 

Springboard has been around for more than a decade and have supported many women in STEM through coaching to effectively present for VC’s with astonishing results. Female VC’s are now hosting open office hours for female founders in New York, San Francisco and Boston. New angel groups focused on women run business are emerging. The train have left the station. Kay Koplovitz founded the USA Network, Chairman & CEO from 1977 until 1998 when it sold for $4.5 billion. Kay is the first woman ever to head a television network as the founder and former CEO of USA Networks. In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed Koplovitz to chair the bipartisan National Women's Business Council. This helped create a platform for her to Co-Found Springboard Enterprises in 2000.

Bill Tai is the founder of the XTC competition which identifies new ground breaking technology companies and invites the winners to visit Necker and present for Richard Branson. The network of investors and entrepreneurs is called ACTAI and meets all over the globe to kitesurf and start new companies. Bill invested in CANVA, pitched by Melanie Perkins, and it’s now a multi-billion-dollar business. Some men do recognize talent and are willing to bet their money on it regardless of location and gender. We need more men like Bill, but we also need more women who are willing to invest their hard-earned dollar in other women—as angel investors.