Edition Opens $15K Grant for Women-Led Startups

By: Women Entrepreneurs Review Team | Monday, 6 July 2026

Edition is inviting applications for its $15,000 Female Founder Grant, which will provide funding to female founders in Australia and New Zealand. Edition, the design-led startup studio, created this grant program to help women-owned companies grow faster through funding and more entrepreneurship opportunities.

Founded by Jodie and Scott Kennedy in 2020, Edition saw that there was a disparity between men and women in the world of startups. The founders revealed that, over five years, the studio had collaborated with more startup founders named ‘Dave’ than women—an observation that inspired the creation of the initiative to increase support for female-led ventures.

The 2026 Female Founder Grant will award one female entrepreneur a grant of Edition’s entrepreneurial consulting services of  $15,000. The services include founder workshops, mentoring, market intelligence, competition research, product strategy development, and pitching to investors. This program aims at equipping women entrepreneurs with the strategies to grow businesses. The deadline for applying is July 27, 2026.

Key Highlights:

• Edition launches $15,000 grant to back women-led innovation
• Grant helps female founders with funding, strategy, and branding
• Applications open until July 27 for Edition's Female Founder Grant

By bringing light to the ever-prevalent gender imbalance in the startup sector, Jodie mentioned that the client list of Edition is also representative of the funding trends in the venture capital world. While the firm's mission is to collaborate with equal number of women and men entrepreneurs by the end of the decade, she also recognized the presence of a lot of barriers that restrict women entrepreneurs from enjoying their fair share.

Jodie said “Companies that we work with generally reflect where venture capital goes. By 2030 we’d love to be working with as many women as we are men, but the industry has a long way to go to get to that place.”

As per Jodie, the percentage of female-founded companies in Edition's client list over the past year was less than 10%, and the percentage of those which were founded by only females was even lower at 2.5%.

“The grant won’t fix the funding gap, but it removes one real barrier: getting support with the strategy, positioning and brand story right at the stage when a founder can least afford to access that help,” she added.

Founder and CEO of the aircraft technology venture ReluGroup, Leila Benab, became the very first winner of the Female Founder Grant offered by Edition. Having received the grant, the company succeeded in obtaining $880,000 worth of pre-seed financing and even secured the services of a major airline company as their client. This is an example of how effective targeted funding can become for women businesswomen.

“When I applied, I had an early prototype and a lot of conviction, but not much else,” Leila noted.

“The grant gave me access to an invaluable foundation that I couldn’t have done on my own: help with brand positioning, a refined product strategy, and a version of the story that investors and customers clearly understood.”