Why you should invest in a startup founded by women

Quin was founded by two women engineers. Cyndi Williams started her career as an engineer at Sun Microsystems and has 20+ years starting, growing, and leading global tech businesses. Isabella Degen is a robotics engineer specialising in machine learning and artificial intelligence, with 14 years of experience delivering complex enterprise engineering systems. That the company was founded by engineers doesn’t surprise anybody who works with us. Every aspect of how we work is touched by the engineering acumen of our founders. That Quin was founded by women, on the other hand, is not something we reflect upon a great deal in our day-to-day work. The skills we need to help people with diabetes–thinking logically, the capacity to feel, and the hustle to get it done–are, we believe, without gender.

Having said that, it does matter that Quin was founded by women and as an investor it should matter a lot. Investors should want to bet on startups that are overlooked but that are more likely to return profits compared to their peers.

Startups founded by women receive less funding than those founded by men. In a recent study by the Boston Group, on average, women raised $935,000 for the company they either founded or co-founded. Men raised double this figure or around $2.12 million. There are probably many reasons for the disparity of funding between men and women entrepreneurs. In some cases men may belong to established networks of male entrepreneurs who support one another. Those founders who succeed go back to support the network that it all possible, and the cycle continues. In other cases, implicit bias may be at play. A study conducted jointly by the University of California and Harvard University has shown that funding applications submitted with a female name, picture, and voice are less likely to receive an investment than those submitted by their male counterparts, even if everything else in the application is exactly the same.

We should all do what we can do resolve this depressing disparity from an ethical point of view alone. But it is also worth paying attention to from a financial view. Although women founders raise significantly less money, their companies generate more revenue than those founded solely by men. Over a five year period, startups founded by women make $730,000 versus $662,000 of revenue made by startups founded by men alone.

Here we have the golden combination sought by all investors: startups founded by women are too often neglected by investors and yet they outperform those founded solely by men.

If you would like to invest in a promising startup founded by two women engineers with 34 years of experience between them, Quin is crowdfunding. Find out more here:  http://bit.ly/2ULxCWB