The founders of Encourage Ventures want to bring investors and founders together and move them forward. They draw a first positive balance.
Dusseldorf They are different types of women. But an idea brought them together a year ago: Ina Schlie, the multi-supervisory board member, Stephanie Bschorr, the entrepreneur, and Tina Müller, the top manager. Together they founded the association Encourage Ventures in June 2021. This has now grown into a network that includes 460 female-led start-ups and 470 female investors. The goal: support each other as founders and investors and encourage more women to become entrepreneurs.
“We want to increase the proportion of women in the start-up scene and also have a political impact,” says Ina Schlie, the initiator of the network and co-chair of the association. And Schlie, who works on the supervisory board of the SDax group Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, among other things, says: “We have already managed to do that in the past twelve months.” An ecosystem has emerged that helps investors and founders alike.
Schlie, Bschorr and Müller, as well as former Allianz board member Ana-Cristina Grohnert, are committed to this with their knowledge, their experience and their own money. They are active as mentors and investors. For Douglas CEO Müller, one of Germany’s top managers, the network is an important step in order to “catch up on Germany’s innovative backwardness and to set the course for a more diverse and thus more successful future for Germany’s female founders in international comparison”.
First successful exit
Since it was founded a year ago, the network has held 50 events, including so-called Pitch Nights, at which over 80 start-ups have been supported with investments, mentoring and sponsorship. Tech start-ups in particular enjoyed great interest. This included Ubimaster, a digital tutoring platform. The founder and CEO Jana Krotsch not only found investors through the network. She says: “At Encourage Ventures, we found not only financing, but above all motivated partners who support us in taking our company to the next level and being able to continue growing.”
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A first exit from the network also made headlines. At the beginning of the year, the two founders Anna Kaiser and Jana Tepe sold their Berlin start-up Tandemploy together with their predominantly female investors to the US tech group Phenom. It was the first so-called “all-female deal”. After all, Germany has so far mainly been the country of male entrepreneurs and founders.
Germany’s start-up scene is open and diverse, but in fact it is more backward than most traditional companies when it comes to promoting women. According to the German Start-up Monitor (DSM), the proportion of women among all start-ups in 2021 was only 17.7 percent. According to data from CB Insights, Germany has now produced 25 unicorns, i.e. start-ups with a market valuation of more than one billion dollars or euros. So far, however, there is exactly one woman among the Einhorn founders: Osnat Michaeli from Infarm.
Political influence
Accordingly, the new women’s network was received positively in the founder and investor scene: Christian Miele, head of the start-up association, says: “Our goal is a cultural change that breaks outdated role models and encourages women to get involved in the start-up ecosystem to establish.” Strengthening the start-up activities of women is not an end in itself, but socially necessary – and above all an imperative of economic reason and necessity.
And even entrepreneurs who are not active in the network, such as the “Fintech Ladies” founder Christine Kiefer, welcome Encourage Ventures as a “problem solution”.
The success inspired the former SAP manager Ina Schlie and her fellow campaigners and also made them politically active. Advantage: Stephanie Bschorr, for example, as long-standing President of the Association of German Women Entrepreneurs (VDU), has good contacts in Berlin. In October, they made recommendations for action to politicians, business and society for the first time. In spring 2022, they were promptly included in the consultations on the federal government’s new start-up strategy. Representatives of the association were involved in workshops organized by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK) and in the online consultation.
And that’s not all. Under the direction of network co-founder Heike Marita Hölzner, professor at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, two research projects were also initiated that are intended to improve the data situation. The first study deals with possible differences in the investment behavior of female investors compared to male investors. The second research project aims to determine the challenges that female founders face during the various phases of the founding process. Hölzner: “With the research projects, we want to substantiate and enforce our demands based on facts in order to invalidate all the ‘killer arguments’ out there.”
More: 50 female entrepreneurs who serve as role models