When we launched Even Founders in 2020, we did so because we were shocked by the ridiculously low amount of funding that goes to women founders. Only around 1.5% of funding goes to women-founded companies, and this is a global trend. And if you look at it the other way, that means that around 92% of all available money in the world goes to male-founded companies (the rest goes to mixed-gender teams).

So we set out to build an organization that will change that. During our initial phases of starting Even Founders we spent a lot of time talking to founders and trying to understand their pain points. This led us to realize that in order to fix the funding gap, we need to fix the founding gap. That is, the gap in the number of companies started by women, in particularly venture-backable companies.

Only around 25% of entrepreneurs in the Nordics are women. This number varies country by country, in some places it’s 20%, in some it’s 30%. But on average, it’s 25%.

Out of those ~25%, even fewer are scalable startup companies. This is not an issue in itself, there are a lot of companies started by men that are not scalable startup companies. However, a large number of those 25% could have the potential to become scalable startups, and we want to help the founders realize that.

That’s why we launched the Startup School as our first offering to women founders. The Startup School provides the tools, network, and information you need to understand how to start a startup. It caters to the needs of women who say ‘I have an idea, but I don’t know where to start’.

With the Startup School, we help women go from idea to MVP. Within 6 weeks we teach them how to:

• Select the right idea
• Turn the idea into a business model
• Talk to customers to validate the problem
• Run validation experiments
• Build the first version of your product
• Pitch your idea to investors

Almost 100 women have gone through our Startup School in the last 3 years. And while we are extremely happy with the impact we get to make every day with our founders, we know that we need to do more.

Empowering more women to start a company and support them on their entrepreneurial journey needs to be a conscious choice, continuous effort, and measurable action that can lead to real impact and results. Equal investment opportunities for women are not guaranteed, it’s a goal.