Anthemis' Female Innovators Lab Fund becomes largest early-stage Fintech fund for female-founded businesses

Anthemis, a specialized asset management that generates value by influencing the transformation of financial systems, announced new investments for its Female Innovators Lab (FIL) Fund from organizations including Visa and BMO.

The fund, which is led by Barclays and includes funding from Aviva, has a current value of $50 million, making it the largest early-stage fintech fund with a female founders' founders emphasis. With this most recent funding, the Fund will continue to create, source, and scale female-founded integrated finance entrepreneurs while investing in more early-stage businesses.

The FIL Fund was established in 2019 and is run by Katie Palencsar, Global Head of Venture Studio at Anthemis. It aggressively invests in women-led enterprises around Europe, the UK, and North America. The strategy used by FIL is based on the embedded finance investment thesis of Anthemis, and it targets company models that integrate financial services into a variety of markets, including e-commerce, sustainability, and beauty.

FIL diversifies transaction sourcing and offers unmatched strategic assistance to the FIL portfolio by combining Anthemis' early-stage asset management capabilities with a single network of strategic investors.

Anthemis has uncovered over 1,500 early-stage female-founded startups through its venture studio and fund, and it has moulded and supported portfolio companies including Addition (a platform for workplace financial health), Pile (a tool for managing cash flow for enterprises), and Upkeep (a marketplace for beauty services), among others.

"Women-led businesses raised just 2% of all US venture capital investment last year, despite accounting for 50% of the world's population, 70% of global household spending, higher profits when they sit in the C-suite, and startups they build having a faster path to the exit. There is a large market opportunity for female founder enterprises, yet they are persistently underfunded.”

According to Katie, FIL is specifically designed to take advantage of this potential by assisting women in creating high-growth, high-impact enterprises at the nexus of finance, technology, and society.

"We now have the capital, strategic partners, and global reach to unlock a new cohort of women leaders blazing the trail for fintech and embedded finance," says BMO, the 8th biggest bank by assets in North America and a worldwide pioneer in digital payments.

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.”