Excerpt from Times article: www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/my-baby-cost-me-my-start-ups-funding-7xbr7bwqt
When Anastasia Leng was deep in negotiations with a venture capital firm to secure cash for her artificial intelligence start-up, she revealed to her would-be backers that she was pregnant.
Although the founder of CreativeX — which provides analytics on digital advertising to the likes of Google, Unilever and Pepsi — thought the meeting had gone well, she soon got a call with bad news.
“They said they would not be proceeding because they had concerns about my pregnancy,” Leng, 36, recalled. “Their concern was that if I had the baby, I would not want to go back to work.”
A year after that incident in 2018, she signed a deal with Beringea, the backer of start-ups such as jewellery brand Monica Vinader and retailer Watchfinder, for a £2.5m cash injection for her London-based business.
Leng’s case, though extreme, underlines the challenges that women face in securing funding. Of every £1 of equity investment, only 13p goes to a business with at least one female founder, according to data provider Beauhurst, despite the fact that a third of businesses are run by women.
The reason for the venture capital (VC) gender funding gap is easy to identify but hard to remedy. More than 70% of VC investors are men, according to Diversity VC, a lobby group. Almost three-quarters are white, and 20% studied at Oxbridge, Harvard or Stanford universities. Investors tend to back firms whose founders they can empathise with or whose products they would use. “There is absolutely no understanding of the realities of being a working mother in senior levels of VC,” said Check Warner, co-founder of Diversity VC. “It creates a terrible and toxic image for the industry.”