Investing in Equality: The Women Taking on Venture Capital’s Gender Gap

Born from a desire to level the investment playing field, Joanna Invests brings together women investors and founders to fund the next generation of female-led businesses.

Listen to the full episode here. 

A stark inequality remains between men and women in the world of investment, from who writes the cheques to who receives them. In the UK, female-founded startups attract less than 3% of total venture capital funding, while only around 14% of angel investors are women. This imbalance dictates whose ideas get funded, whose voices are heard, and who shapes the future of business.

This week on Profit Meets Purpose Claire Tange, Co-founder of Joanna Invests, discusses the community of female investors and founders she has built. When Tange hears stories about female founders being asked whether they plan to start families or if they’re “serious enough” about running a company, she recognises the narrative all too well. “It’s that quiet underestimation,” she says. “Even women with ten or 15 years of experience are treated as if they’re just starting out.”

The former startup CFO and investment banker has spent her career in rooms where women were routinely outnumbered. Her response has been to build a business that flips that balance entirely. 

The impact could be profound. As more wealth comes under female control, the questions asked of founders, and the types of business that win backing, will begin to change - starting with the startups in Joanna Invests’ portfolios. 

A portfolio with purpose

Founded three years ago in 2023, Joanna Invests is designed to make startup investing more accessible to women. The community now has more than 500 members, a quarter of whom have already invested. The minimum investment is €2,000 which is deliberately low compared to other funds which can require €100,000-plus ticket sizes. 

The reason for this lower threshold is to actively support those who are more likely to suffer from the pension gap. 

Across Europe, women retire with around 40% less pension than men and earn roughly €300,000 less over their working lives. Those figures are the product of multiple inequities, gender pay gaps, career breaks for childcare, and lower rates of investment. 

Tange saw the problem first-hand throughout her career. “We need to be smarter with our money,” she says. “Once we have it, we need to invest.” Even for willing investors, Tange says, deal flow is hard to access without an established network and harder still when focusing on female founders.

Since its first deal in 2022 - an investment in tech platform We Are Eves, described as TripAdvisor for beauty products - Joanna Invests has backed ten female-founded companies across sustainability, fintech, health, and sport.

Among them is Quan, a wellbeing software company for teenagers that became Joanna Invests’ first exit after being acquired by a strategic partner. 

Current investee companies include Ozarka, which makes reusable packaging for caterers to cut single-use plastic, CurveCatch, a Belgian lingerie startup using AI to find the perfect fit; and Hera United, the Netherlands’ first professional women’s football club.

To date, Joanna Invests has invested domestically but has ambitions to grow across borders. Its first UK investment is Luna a UK-based app supporting teenage girls through adolescence.

Each company aligns with Tange’s belief that impact and returns aren’t mutually exclusive. “We invest in women who change the world whether that’s socially, environmentally, or technologically,” she says. 

The power of community

Joanna Invests has placed great emphasis on the value of community. Before investment, for example, founders host webinars with potential investors. Afterwards, Joanna Invests arranges small ‘investor dinners at the founders’ offices, where women meet the teams behind the products they’re backing. “Those evenings are incredibly energising,” she says. “Women ask different questions; they're more interested in understanding how the business really works, not just what the numbers say.”

The firm has grown fast since launch, doubling its assets under management every year, from €250,000 at launch to a projected €2 million by the end of 2025. That growth is significant, given that most of its investors are first-timers.

Tange believes the next decade will bring a seismic shift in financial power to women. As baby boomers pass down assets, more women than in previous generations will inherit wealth and will control more capital independently than ever before. The question, she says, is what they’ll do with it.

“There’s going to be a large group of women who suddenly have significant wealth, but not necessarily the knowledge or confidence to invest it,” she says. “That’s where we come in.”

For Tange, financial literacy and independence are inseparable from equality. “Having money gives you options,” she says. It gives you freedom to leave a job, start a business, or just make choices on your own terms. 

And when women do invest, the outcomes often ripple beyond returns. “Women tend to back ideas that make the world better,” she adds. “If we can channel that at scale, we create a cycle where money and meaning feed each other.” 

Full circle

Ultimately, Tange wants Joanna Invests to complete the loop by funding female founders who later become investors themselves. “That’s the goal,” she says. “You invest in them, they build something successful, they exit and then they come back and invest in the next generation.

“For so long,” Tange says, “venture capital has been about the same people funding the same kinds of businesses. But when you change who invests, you change what gets built.”

Listen to the full episode here.