Female Foundry Week 58: Global venture fundraising hits nine-year low. Tools for growth while low on cash. Getting your pricing right. Should market momentum determine valuation? Alpha Wolves Summit.
Welcome to The Week 58, 2023 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - where investors and female founders meet.
In The News
Germany-based Finway, co-founded by Jennifer Dussileck, bags a €9.2m Series A round led by Capital 49 to make finance processes hassle-free; Sweden-based Gofrendly, co-founded by Claudia Gård and Ulrika Lilja, picks a €1.2m Seed round led by JNE Invest to accelerate the growth of the women-focused social app; Paris-based Carbon Maps, co-founded by Estelle Huynh, snaps a €4m Pre-Seed round led by Breega and Samaipata to reduce the food industry’s carbon footprint problem.
Spotlight
Global venture fundraising hits nine-year low.
Plunging valuations, rising interest rates and inflation have narrowed opportunities for LPs to back new funds and led to a pause in payouts from their existing allocations. According to the data published by Prequin this week, venture firms raised $20.6bn globally in new funds in Q4 2022, which represents the lowest amount in the fourth quarter since 2013. LPs invested in 226 venture capital funds during this time, which is also the fewest for that time period since 2012. Clearly, gone are the days of LP shopping bonanza and it is emerging managers that seem to be taking the biggest hit. For the whole of 2022, LPs backed only 141 first-time funds globally, that represents a 59% decline from the prior year - and again the lowest number since 2013. Read full story ➯
Fundraising
Tools to help you grow while fundraising on low cash.
Six out of ten startups I spoke with this week had been struggling to build fundraising momentum with VCs or angel investors in the past couple of months. With unfavourable market conditions, and a bleak fundraising horizon, what tools can you leverage to improve your metrics and control your cash burn while fundraising?Leverage trials, freemium product, business development ➯ check these, and low-code ➯ check these tools to build your MVP or demonstrate new product features. For sales, switch to pay-per-conversion marketing and take advantage of the latest explosion of AI tools, here is the list that you might find useful. Last, if your traction looks weak, focus on growth before you start talking to investors. You will find no luck counting on cutting an opportunistic deal. Read full story ➯
Getting your pricing right.
I regularly encounter startups that treat pricing as an afterthought. They spend months developing their products, rush into launch, and pay little attention to getting their product pricing right. You can have an excellent value proposition, but if your pricing is off - you won’t attract any paying users or maximise your revenue opportunities. Pricing is an integral part of finding your product-market fit. Here is a great video explaining the pricing discovery process. Check why cost-plus pricing does not work. Here are 7 pricing types and an interesting article on how perceived value works from a psychology perspective and how to influence it. Read full story ➯
Analysis
Should market momentum determine startup’s valuation?
“Letting the market determine the price” favours founders in hot markets, when valuations are high and when, FOMOed investors tend to freely deploy capital. In cooler markets, like the current one, where the cost of capital is high, investors that over-deployed, having been carried away by an over-hyped market, stay on the sidelines, letting great ideas in overlooked segments go unfunded. But should market momentum and startup valuation go hand in hand? And if you really believe that a startup has got a strong structural advantage, then shouldn’t the focus be on achieving terminal value, as supposed to temporary market sentiment? Value versus price. Isn’t moving away from comparables and staying rational, exactly the one thing we can control during volatile markets? Read full story ➯
From the Community
Alpha Wolves Summit x Female Foundry
Female Foundry is an official partner of the Alpha Wolves Summit in London taking place on the 8-9 of March and we have 1 x €929 FREE Pass to give away to the Female Foundry Community!
Get a 30% promo code on all ticket types here.
To enter the FREE ticket draw, submit your interest below. Deadline: 03 March, 10pm BST. T&C of Alpha Wolves Summit apply. I will announce the winners here next Saturday. Good luck!
EU-Startups x Female Foundry | 20-21 of April 2023 | Barcelona
The complimentary ticket winners are: Jenny (NRSyd6) and Alba (S78sbd). You can view the draw here. Congratulations! I will get in touch with you shortly.
Hiring
This week hiring
XbyX, Women in Balance ➯ Content Manager | Vira Health ➯ Executive Assistant | Peppy ➯ Senior Project Manager.
For more listings, check Female Foundry Job Board.
Founder & Investor Meetups
Monday, February 27, London ➯ How To Find Investors For Your Startup? Thursday, March 2, London ➯ Networking Event Thursday, March 2, London ➯ Pitch Up Workshops Wednesday, March 3, Online ➯ Round Table Session for Investors & Startups.
That’s all for this week. See you next Saturday!
Agata
Written by Agata Leliwa Nowicka, an investor, a two-time entrepreneur, and a founder of Female Foundry based in London.
Suggestions? Drop me an email.
Check femalefoundry.co for more fundraising tools and investor content. View other Female Foundry articles.
♡
Thank you Eden, and Mariangela Cordella from Nauta Capital for sourcing our weekly meetups.