Aurora Ventures Launches Initiative to Invests in Women Founders

By: WE Staff | Friday, 1 May 2026

• The initiative to support overlooked women founders in emerging markets
• Backed by inDrive for early-stage investment advantage
• Provides funding plus mentorship and growth support

Aurora Ventures has started a new investment initiative to support female entrepreneurs in the developing world who operate successful and rapidly growing companies that often go unnoticed by traditional venture capitalists.

Aurora Ventures launches today, backed by inDrive, which operates across many of the same developing areas being focused on during Aurora Ventures’ pilot program scheduled for 2026.

Aurora Ventures believes there are currently too many quality businesses being created by women in the developing world that are not receiving proper recognition and support; thus, the investment strategy involves taking advantage of opportunities presented by identifying and financing quality companies earlier in their development cycle than would typically occur.

Aurora just finished up research with over 900 interviews of entrepreneurs from 127 countries and there is evidence showing a significant imbalance between men and women entrepreneurs. The majority of female entrepreneurs pointed to four primary challenges they face in accessing enough capital — intersectional bias; skepticism about their skill level; creating traction is much more difficult for them than for men; doing business in a region or culture that is not theirs. Aurora has also recognized that similar things can be found in developing countries so the hypothesis is that mispricing exists not only in who gets funded but also in how investors are measuring these entrepreneurs.

Aurora Ventures has a unique opportunity to identify investments using the Aurora Tech Awards. Over the last four years, Aurora has developed one of the largest databases of early-stage female entrepreneurs who do not have access to traditional venture capitalists. Rather than looking for investments that are already available, Aurora Ventures invests at a stage where there is the most potential and before valuations have been adjusted to take into consideration performance. Therefore, this allows for these investments to be replicated on a very large scale.

Aurora Ventures is an innovation organisation that has developed an extensive sourcing and support system for its portfolio companies. Companies in Aurora's portfolio have access to multiple types of support, including introductions to networks, curated introductions, and operational help in the future, all of which are aimed at improving their ability to execute and increasing their readiness for investors by enabling faster time to raise additional financing at favourable terms.

The programme was created through the support of inDrive, which has become a marketplace alternative in the New Ventures initiative and achieved a valuation of $1 billion (unicorn status) through its growth in the space.

Today, inDrive's international footprint has expanded to support 48 countries across all regions, including those emerging markets where Aurora has recently invested or is considering investing. This is seen by both inDrive and Aurora Ventures as a logical continuation of both of their prior successes and a firm belief that neglected and smaller companies in emerging markets can grow to be the next generation of leaders in their respective markets.

The Aurora Ventures Programme 2026 is being launched as a pilot with two key objectives: the creation of an initial portfolio, and the achievement of a track record that will serve as the foundation for the future development of Aurora Ventures into a formalised GP/LP fund structure.

Isabella Ghassemi-Smith, Head of Aurora Ventures and the Aurora Tech Award, said: “Over the past four years, we’ve seen the same pattern repeat: exceptional women founders building strong businesses, but reaching institutional capital later and on worse terms than their performance justifies. Aurora Ventures is our response – a disciplined investment programme built on the conviction that women founders in emerging markets are one of the most overlooked opportunities in venture today. We’re not waiting for the market to correct itself.”

Andries Smit, Chief Growth Businesses Officer, inDrive, said: “We built inDrive against all odds – competing against platforms that were earlier, bigger and better-funded than us – and turned it into a global unicorn. We see the same thing playing out with women founders in emerging markets today: an overlooked opportunity hiding in plain sight. Backing Aurora Ventures is not charity and it is not optics. It is the same bet we made on ourselves.”