Female Foundry Week 104: In the name of. Step forward. Secondaries come on top. In conversation with: Videesha Boeckle.
Welcome to The Week 104, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - where investors and female founders meet.
In the news
Irish legal-tech startup Legitify, co-founded by Aida Lutaj, picks up a €1.5m Seed round led by Verb Venture; Amsterdam-based Vini Mini, co-founded by Laurie Lancee and Jozien Boersma picks up a €5m Seed round for its child healthcare startup.
Ada Ventures, co-founded by Check Werner, closes a second fund of €73.7 million to continue backing “Inclusive Alpha” founders across climate equity, economic empowerment and healthy ageing at Pre-Seed and Seed stages.
Spotlight
In the name of.
With CHANGE NOW happening in Paris in just over a week, there has been a build-up in expectation for this year’s edition. As per the Female Foundry State of Gender Diversity report released last month, climate has been the most popular thesis for female first-time fund managers raising funds last year. It is estimated that $20bn was deployed into climate-tech solutions in 2023 in Europe alone.
Yet, despite the clear rise of interest in climate as an investment class over the past years, it looks like the appetite for capital allocation into climate is starting to wane. Some of the biggest asset managers, J.P. Morgan, PIMCO, State Street and Invesco individually announced over the course of past few weeks that they were quitting Climate Action 100+, dampening the interest of other climate investors. BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, also confirmed pulling out as a corporate member and transferring its participation to the smaller corporate arm. Why does it matter?
Climate is a challenging class to invest in. Finding genuine opportunities in industrial decarbonisation, where companies are truly dedicated to transitioning, heavily depends on aligning incentives, managing risks associated with developing new technologies, and phasing out outdated assets. The presence of big players, who also typically dictate terms, makes investing a whole lot more complex and managing expectations around impact more volatile.
On Monday this week, Shell announced it would abandon its 2035 emissions targets and ‘reassess’ those for 2030, drawing a big question mark around its actual commitment. That’s after a number of global banks cancelled applications to get their climate goals approved by a United Nations framework few months ago.
While climate remains a favoured sector for asset managers, family offices, VC firms, and patient capital allocators, its future performance and the scale at which it will operate remain uncertain due to the shifting interests of major players. I'm keen to find out if any of these concerns will be addressed at the upcoming event in Paris.
Fundraising
Step forward.
On Thursday this week - the Pi Day - the most powerful rocket ever built, which will soon carry astronauts to the moon for NASA, launched for the third time from the Gulf of Mexico. During the 47-minute test flight, it reached a number of new milestones, before eventually losing contact with the ground as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere. I watched its entire journey live - from the spectacular take-off, through its nail-biting crossing beyond Earth's atmosphere, and its mesmerising cruise in space, to the somewhat beautiful entry back into the atmosphere as it was bursting into flames before finally losing contact with Earth. The imagery of its re-entry, I think, was the most 'cosmic'. You can re-watch it here.
But what does the launch of the biggest rocket have got to do with startups and fundraising? Ah, a lot. SpaceX, which also turned 22 years old on that day, is behind the launch, and when you study SpaceX’s ‘product roadmap’ for this year, its plans are ambitious. What strikes me is that despite the massive funding required to materialise its mission to put a human onto Mars and the complexity of iterations that come with such ambitions, SpaceX has kept going, invigorating the entire space-tech industry and making it the most agile it has ever been, even surpassing the Cold War era. This is largely due to the principles that SpaceX adopted early on in order to maximise on funding (and time) to make every test flight count. (Those principles are: 1. Make the requirements less dump. 2. Delete as part of the build process. 3. Optimise. 4. Accelerate. 5. Automate.)
In a world of accolades, instant rewards, and constant gratification, your failures will not be necessary seen as progress by your investors, partners, or clients, unless you change the way you see them and talk about them. So many things in Thursday’s flight went wrong, yet so many also went just right, and that’s what counts. As long as you focus on progress as a means to achieve your vision, you’re good. To me, watching the jubilant SpaceX team as their starship kept progressing through time was exhilarating. Despite the drawbacks, 'we' were winning.
Analysis
Secondaries come on top.
Secondaries seem to be defying the otherwise challenging climate for private capital fundraising. The newly released report shows that while the overall private capital fundraising in 2023 dropped by approx. 20% from 2022, funds focusing on secondary transactions actually raised 65% more capital.
Last year, fundraising for secondaries soared to its second-highest peak in a decade, amassing almost $80bn across 72 different funds globally. Blackstone’s Strategic Partners Secondaries IX fund, alone raised $22bn of capital, representing over 28% of the total raised for secondaries in 2023. Other mega-funds raised included Goldman Sachs' Vintage IX, which closed at $14bn in September, and Glendower Capital's Secondary Opportunities V, closing at $6bn in July. With slow distributions to LPs and overall lack of liquidity across private markets, one thing is clear: the opportunity for secondaries in private equity, including venture capital, remains huge.
Community
In conversation with: Videesha Boeckle, General Partner at āltitude.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with a good friend, Videesha Boeckle, a General Partner at āltitude, an early-stage fund based in the UK and Germany, and an emerging fund manager, about her journey of raising a fund, why backing startups that digitise SMEs is important for thriving economy and about her hopes for 2024.
Tune in! The extract of this conversation can also be seen in our State of Gender Diversity in European Venture report.
Ticket draw: TechChill Riga | April 16-17th | Riga, Latvia
The complimentary ticket winners are: Johanna (pcDCM) and Patricia (BAs7M). I will get in touch with you shortly. You can view the draw here.
Founder & Investor meetups
20 March ➯ London - TechInvest – Investing across the UK: CleanTech | 21st March ➯ Paris - Women in Deeptech.
Also, if you are planning to go to CHANGE NOW happening in Paris in 10 days’ time, and you haven’t got a ticket, use the code: CN24_MAHARZI for a 50% discount (!). Thank you Imène for sharing the code.
Hiring
This week hiring:
Fifth Dimension AI ➯ Founding Engineer | Flash Pack ➯ Partnerships Manager | Planet A Foods ➯ Founders Associate.
See more jobs on the Female Foundry Job Board.
That’s it for this week. Have a great week ahead!
Agata
Written by Agata Leliwa Nowicka, an investor, a startup adviser, a two-time entrepreneur, and a founder of Female Foundry based in London.
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Check femalefoundry.co for more fundraising tools and investor content. View other Female Foundry articles.