This venture fund wants more billion-dollar businesses founded by women

An itch for entrepreneurialism came early for Marisa Warren, who recalls working alongside her art gallery owner grandmother — her inspiration — at exhibitions, serving drinks and recognising that she wanted a creative, exciting career pathway too.

What she didn’t expect was that career pathway would formulate inside tech — an industry she’d always deemed as one for “geeky boys”.

But a chance break into a role at a training and development company in 1997 saw Warren working side by side with the IT manager and a passion for all things tech, rapidly form.

From there she went on to work at SAP, Microsoft, and Workday with roles in direct sales and building channel businesses.

Throughout it all, her mentors were men.

With few women in the industry at that stage, and fewer still at the decision-making table, Warren also noted a pervasive culture of women viewing each other as competitive threats.

It was this realisation that saw Warren build ELEVACAO, a global pre-accelerator for women tech founders.

The 100% virtual program focused on founders in the early stage (pre-seed/seed) of business growth and since launch, has empowered 175 women across the US and Australia who have raised more than $100 million and produced 3 Exits.

“It was, you know, this strange concept of women helping other women which just was not happening at the time. There’s just been a lot of talk and not enough action in the industry”, Warren puts it simply.

It was the success of ELEVACAO that solidified Warren’s mission to help women founders pull ahead.

“There’s something in me that that wants to see women successful. I want to see more billion-dollar businesses founded and led by women”, she says.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, funding for female founders dried up overnight but Warren’s initial instinct was to shift the dial. Contacting Kate Vale, a former Google exec, she pitched the idea of starting a venture fund.

Vale jumped heartily on board with the idea, and the pair spent six months considering the investment thesis and the impact they wanted to have, setting up the back office. By 2021, they’d started fundraising and deploying capital.

Warren notes the pair’s belief “that the ideal founder is a combination of both Aussie and US,” but with Australian markets having been capital constrained for many years, the founders were focused on capital efficiency and thinking about revenue generation strategies from the outset. ALIAVIA is uniquely based in California but invests exclusively in female tech founders in Australia and the US.

“If you get a combination of all those characteristics of an Australian founder with the US ambition and drive it works. You can’t build a venture scale business just focused on Australia. You have to expand out and quite often the next market is the US, but then to survive in the US. It’s so competitive”, Warren notes. “You need to think big you need to be competitive and really on your game so that’s why we like investing across both markets”.

While ALIAVIA is open to all industries, Warren suggests some spaces where she’s seeing significant growth include health, fintech, media, entertainment, HR and data analytics.

The fund is backed by well-known Aussie LPs including Carol Schwartz (Trawalla, EQT and Climate Council), Tattarang (the Forrest Family Office), Robyn & Victoria Denholm (Wollemi Capital Group), Dom Pym (Euphemia, Founder of Up Bank) and Cynthia Scott (Zip Co), and has already invested in Aussie startups including healthtech company, Eugene, Loupe, HowToo and Othelia AI.

With just 2% of female-founded companies in the US per year securing VC funding, and the figure even lower for Australian-owned ventures, Warren knows how much we’re losing out on.

“We know that when you have a diverse leadership team, they make more money,” she says.

“Female founders, they’re more collaborative, build better innovation, get more of an understanding of the target demographic, you know? All of these things that equate to the end result of achieving on average, 35% higher ROI”.

Warren also suggests the need for more women at the managing partner level to have power over investment decisions as well as the importance of having an investment mandate to invest in female founders. A third critical driver she says, is having corporate quotas and KPIs to drive behaviour changes and to develop a gender lens on investment strategies.

She also criticises the cultural tendency to perceive female-owned ventures as “side hustles” but believes that over time, and with true support in place, the tide will turn.

“You will still have those biases from old school. But I think what we can do about it, we’ve just got to help women to be successful and then start showcasing them.

“That’s what we started doing with ELEVACAO and now we’re transitioning with ALIAVIA, because people love following success and backing success and then eventually that’ll start turning the tide.”

This article was first published by Women’s Agenda.