Cocoon Capital
Cocoon Capital launches the 4th edition of Female Founders Mentoring Hours (FFMH)! This time, we are excited to partner with She Loves Tech, the world’s largest startup competition for women and technology.
Supported by Enterprise Singapore and Amazon Web Services (AWS), 47 investors from the top 34 venture capital firms in Southeast Asia will join us as mentors, offering their invaluable expertise to 120 female founders from across the region.
The event will be held over two days, Wednesday, 24 March and Thursday, 25 March, 2 – 4 pm SGT (GMT+8). Each female founder will have the opportunity to meet four investors for one hour of remote mentoring hours. During each 13-minute session, founders can discuss their tech business idea, ask for advice and pitch for investment.
Female founders can sign up now at this link: https://bit.ly/ffmh-slt-2021
Bridging the gap in female founder funding
In 2020, disappointingly, female-led companies’ funding dropped from 2.6% in 2019 to 2.2%, an even smaller piece of the pie. One of the main reasons is access to capital. At Cocoon Capital, we noticed that there is still a relatively low percentage of female founders applying for funding.
FFMH aims to proactively bridge this funding gap between male and female founders. So far, we have facilitated 1,000 mentoring sessions, connecting 240 founders with 65 mentors from top venture capital firms in Southeast Asia. FFMH hopes to move the needle by facilitating warmer introductions to VCs and offering female founders a space to practice their pitch or obtain feedback on their business models.
Beyond addressing the problem of access to investors – 90+% of investors prefer warm introductions to founders – FFMH equips female founders with the tools for long-term success through mentorship.
In a survey conducted during the previous edition of FFMH, we found that fundraising is the top challenge encountered by female founders. Our findings are in line with research published in She Loves Tech’s 2020 report.
She Loves Tech is committed to supporting women entrepreneurs in their fundraising efforts; alumni of the competition have gone on to raise more than US$150 million. We are proud to partner with an organisation that shares the same values, goals and aspirations for the startup ecosystem.