inDrive Backs Aurora Ventures to Empower Women Tech Founders

By: Women Entrepreneurs Review Team | Monday, 25 May 2026

Global mobility and urban services platform inDrive has directly endorsed the launch of Aurora Ventures as it seeks to challenge imbalances in institutional funding of the global tech ecosystem.

The early-stage investment vehicle will be launched to target emerging market high-growth, high-traction women-led technology startups and Nigeria will form one of the operational high-priority markets.

The creation of the fund comes months after Nigeria's healthtech entrepreneur, Adeola Ayoola, founder of the healthtech platform Famasi, won a grand finale in the 2026 Aurora Tech Award in Santiago, Chile, after emerging as one of 10 finalists from a record number of 3,400 healthtech entrepreneurs from 127 countries. Participants from Colombia's fintech industry were headed to the pitching event by Mercedes Bidart, founder and CEO of alternative credit assessment firm Quipu, who took the grand prize.

The company Aurora Ventures is designed to take advantage of a longstanding market inefficiency that was discovered by the company after five years of running the Aurora Tech Award.

A new research study by Aurora that surveyed more than 900 international tech founders revealed that applications from women tech innovators have increased almost 30 times since 2021, but at the same time, they face systemic “competence skepticism” and are frequently asked to meet higher expectations for “traction” by traditional VC firms.

  Key Highlights:

●  inDrive launched Aurora Ventures to fund women-led startups

●  Built on insights from the Aurora Tech Award

●  Focuses on fixing low VC funding for women founders (~1.4%)

Even with statistics on the global level indicating that all-women founding teams generated two times as much revenue for every $1 invested as all-male teams, women teams accounted for only 1.4 percent of global VC funding.

Aurora Ventures will invest $180,000 to $250,000 in pre-seed and seed-stage investments, capturing this market mispricing and creating alpha in emerging markets.

The investment program makes use of the award's internal sourcing network to spot the top performer companies and helps them get capital in early stages of the company's growth, when the market price does not yet reflect on the metrics.

“Over the past five years, we’ve seen a repeating pattern: exceptional women building rigorous businesses but reaching institutional capital later and on worse terms than their performance justifies,” stated Isabella Ghassemi-Smith.  Head of Aurora Ventures. She described the vehicle as a disciplined investment program built on the firm conviction that women founders represent one of the most overlooked arbitrage opportunities in venture capital today.

It's a disciplined investment programme, she said with great conviction, because today, women are one of the most underutilised arbitrage opportunities in VC. Its investment model is based on the operating growth of its backer inDrive, which became a unicorn in global markets through growing into untapped areas.

InDrive Chief Growth Businesses Officer Andries Smit mentioned that the funding initiative is not a CSR project, but a strategic one for the corporation.

“We built inDrive against all odds, competing against better-funded incumbents. We see the same thing playing out with women founders in emerging markets today. Backing Aurora Ventures is not charity; it is the same bet we made on ourselves,” Isabella said.

The first set of portfolios created during the pilot will then become the institutional track record to make the transition to a formal GP/LP model where the aim is to fast-track women-led startups for further funding rounds on equal terms.