The Time is Now for the EU to Equal the Stakes for European Women in VC

July 15th was an exciting day for women in European VC! In response to the appalling lack of female VC funding in the EU, 25 female General Partners from different EU countries gathered together with the support of European Women in VC, an initiative which has grown to nearly 700 senior VC women professionals, on a mission to build a strong and active community of Women in VC to propose solutions to the problem actively involving EU institutions.

The leaders of this initiative presented Mariya Gabriel, the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education, and Youth, with a comprehensive report developed by the General Partners of Venture Capital Funds on the state of VC funding along with a set of initiatives to ensure equal access to capital for European female-led Venture Capital funds.

Commissioner Mariya voiced her support and reassured her commitment to co-create and advance these proposals. She invited the leaders of the initiative to continue to lead by example and proposed they meet every six months to evaluate the progress.

This group’s mission is to help women-led funds build LP relationships, encourage impact investing from VCs into women-founded companies, and to grow the under-represented female VC community from the current level of around 2% throughout Europe.

The proposal aims to:

emphasize the importance of pushing the industry as well as investors up to invest up to 30% of the all available capital in women-led funds;
stimulate the drive for more inclusion and diversity in portfolio companies;
encourage female-founded VC firms to invest more in female-led companies;
highlight the initiative of establishing a Fund of Funds investing in women-led funds