Fundraising as a Female Founder

Raising venture capital is hard for everyone. The premise of this night was that it comes with an entirely different set of challenges when you are a woman, and that the useful version of that conversation is the honest one. Two founders who have each raised recently sat down at the European Startup Embassy in China Basin and talked through what the process actually looked like for them.

Patrycja Brzozowska built and scaled a startup in Warsaw through its exit, then moved to San Francisco and raised more than $1 million for Mos Health. Shivani Poddar led AI engineering at Google DeepMind and Google Labs before founding Wajo AI, and she angel invests, so she has sat on both sides of the table. Between them they covered rejection, investor conviction, choosing who you take money from, and how to tell a story someone wants to bet on.

Vladimira Cincurova of the European Startup Embassy opened the night with how she got into investing at 25, on a first check of $1,000. It was not profitable. It did teach her the hustle, and her call to action was that we need more female investors, and that $1,000 can be enough to start. The specifics from the workshop stayed in the room.