The Female Innovators Lab Fund from Anthemis became the largest early-stage Fintech fund for female-founded companies

By: WE Staff | Friday, 28 April 2023

Anthemis, a specialised asset management company that creates value by influencing the modernization of financial institutions, has announced fresh investments for its Female Innovators Lab (FIL) Fund from companies including Visa and BMO.

The fund has a current value of $50 million, making it the largest early-stage fintech fund with a focus on female founders. It is overseen by Barclays and includes money from Aviva. The Fund will continue to develop, identify, and scale female-founded integrated finance startups as it makes more early-stage investments thanks to this most recent round of funding.

As the global head of Anthemis' venture studio, Katie Palencsar launched and oversees the FIL Fund in 2019. It actively invests in businesses run by women throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America. The embedded finance investment thesis of Anthemis forms the foundation of FIL's strategy, which focuses on business models that include financial services into a range of areas, including e-commerce, sustainability, and beauty.

By integrating Anthemis' early-stage asset management expertise with a single network of strategic investors, FIL diversifies deal sourcing and provides unrivalled strategic support to the FIL portfolio.

Through its venture studio and fund, Anthemis has discovered over 1,500 early-stage female-founded startups. It has also shaped and supported its portfolio companies, including Upkeep (a marketplace for beauty services), Pile (a tool for managing cash flow for businesses), and Addition (a platform for workplace financial health).

"Despite representing 50% of the world's population, 70% of global household spending, better profitability when they sit in the C-suite, and firms they establish having a speedier route to the exit, women-led enterprises raised just 2% of all US venture capital funding last year. Female founder businesses have a huge market opportunity, yet they are consistently underfunded.

Katie claims that FIL was created particularly to capitalise on this potential by aiding women in starting high-impact, high-growth businesses at the intersection of finance, technology, and society.

BMO, the eighth-largest bank by assets in North America and a global leader in digital payments, declares that it now has the resources, strategic partners, and global reach to unleash a new generation of women leaders who are paving the way for fintech and embedded finance.

According to Charlotte Hogg, chief executive officer of Visa Europe, "Women power economies around the world, but they remain underrepresented in the fintech sector with many barriers to overcome." "At Visa, we think collaboration with various companies, financial institutions, and fintechs is crucial. Only by doing this can new financial and commercial services that serve the interests of all communities and underrepresented groups be fostered. We are thrilled to work with Anthemis to carry out our shared goal of promoting women's economic progress and assisting in making becoming digital beneficial to everyone, everywhere.”

Anthemis is ideally equipped to head FIL because it was one of the first asset managers to develop a diversity and inclusion objective. Women make up 69% of all investors, 48% of portfolio firm founders are female or persons of colour, and 58% of Anthemis staff are female.

According to Andrew Harrison, Head of U.S. Partnerships at BMO, "BMO's investment in Anthemis' Female Innovators Lab Fund is aligned with our Zero Barriers to Inclusion strategy, which includes fostering economic advancement and removing obstacles to the inclusion of women and women-owned businesses everywhere. We are closing the gender gap by enabling more women to advance creative technology via our support for FIL and the ongoing success of WMNfintech, North America's biggest nonprofit fintech industry program for women-led fintechs founded by BMO and 1871.”