“When you change who invests, you change what gets built.”
This week on Profit Meets Purpose Claire Tange, Co-Founder of Joanna Invests, discusses the community of female investors and founders she has built since 2022.
Claire saw the problem of gender inequality first-hand while working in both investment banking and startups. “We need to be smarter with our money,” she says. “Once we have it, we need to invest.” Even for willing investors, Claire says, deal flow is hard to access without an established network and harder still when focusing on female founders.
Since the first deal in 2022, into 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.
Joanna Invests has placed great emphasis on the value of community. Before investment, founders host webinars with potential investors. Afterwards, Joanna Invests arranges small “investor dinners” at the founders’ offices, where women meet the people 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”.
Ultimately, Claire 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.”
Listen to the episode for the full conversation with Claire and learn how Joanna Invests is empowering a generation of female investors.
ST Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk
Joanna Invests Website: https://www.joannainvests.com/
Contact: daisy.moll@sustainabletimes.co.uk