- Edition 11 of Europe-wide Female Founder Office Hours is a key milestone for Europe’s largest diversity-led founder initiative
- This event will bring together over 300 female founders and 170 VCs from some of the world’s leading funds
- The latest funding data shows that over £1.4bn has been raised by companies that have attended one of the previous editions
- Since October 2019, Playfair’s office hours has delivered over 9,000 mentoring sessions for women founders across Europe
LONDON, 8 MARCH 2024:
On Thursday 18th April, 2024, Playfair and 150 of the world’s leading venture capital funds, including Atomico, Balderton, Cherry, Headline, Octopus, Partech, Plug & Play, Point Nine, Seedcamp, and Speedinvest will be holding remote office hours for more than 300 female founders from across Europe.
Dispensing with the need for warm introductions and breaking down the barriers to investment, each founder will have the opportunity to meet four investors over one hour of remote office hours to discuss their tech idea, seek advice, pitch for investment or be mentored.
The event is being held by Playfair as part of its long-term commitment to address the gender imbalance in venture funding and will continue the use of AI matching technology. This technology improves the relevance of founder-to-investor matching, increases the likelihood of relevant conversations and, ultimately, funding being secured. Every investor participating in the initiative has pledged to take on one founder from each edition for ongoing mentoring, giving depth as well as breadth of support.
The previous ten editions saw a total of 9,000 individual mentoring sessions with over 2,000 founders and 200+ investors taking part. To date, 25% of founders have gone on to raise funding after attending an event, with recent success stories including Apoha, Pangea, Carcinotech, Kamma, Hydrogrid, and Material Evolution. This amounts to £1.4B in total funding that has been disclosed over the last five years.
Chris Smith, Managing Partner at Playfair Capital: “We recognise that there’s no single quick fix in addressing the lack of funding for female founders. We need the entire ecosystem to play its part and all pull in the same direction. We’re proud that over the last five years, our Female Founders Office Hours initiative has brought our peers to the table to deliver over 9000 mentoring sessions and helped companies raise over £1.4bn. But the job is far, far from over.”
Liz Gilligan, Founder and CEO of Material Evolution, who raised a £15m Series A in 2023 commented:
“We met our lead investor — Playfair — through an FFOH session. That one conversation over 15 minutes secured our first round of funding and since then we have gone on to raise a £15m Series A. Initiatives like FFOH increase the chances of connecting with the right investors for your company and I’d encourage any woman founder raising, or thinking about raising, to apply.”
For more information and to make an application to attend the event please go to: https://playfair.vc/community.php
-ENDS-
About Playfair
Playfair is a generalist VC fund with a contrarian approach to pre-seed technology investing. Based in London, Playfair invests across the UK and Europe with an intentionally high conviction, low volume approach: making 6–8 investments a year out of its third $70m fund and preserving time, capital and resource to help companies post-investment. Playfair has backed 70+ companies since 2013, including Thought Machine, Andela, Mapillary, Recycleye and Orca AI.
