Global Shakers is taking a look at five of the women behind Female Founders, a London-based group of investors that provides support to female entrepreneurs and their visions to build great companies. The group was inspired by its counterpart in the US.
According to Fortune, female founders only receive about 2% of all venture capital funds. The #MeToo movement may have unearthed the sexual harassment women in business are subjected to, but it hasn’t resulted in female founders being given the same resources as their male counterparts. Groups like Female Founders aim to right this wrong, and ensure that venture capitalism is a profession where women can and should be as likely to succeed as men.
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Eileen Burbidge
Passion Capital

Eileen Burbidge at Passion Capital Source: The Times
Hannah Seal is another venture capitalist who has a penchant for being drawn to early-stage investments. The University of Cambridge economics graduate tends to focus on SaaS projects, e-commerce, marketplaces and healthcare. She is a partner at Index Ventures, a firm with offices in London and San Francisco California that has already backed some major players in the fintech market, in addition to the SaaS market. This includes Revolut, the first digital banking platform to break even (and a unicorn start-up), and iZettle, a social payments company. Aside from its focus on financial services, the fund also backed Dropbox, Facebook, Slack, Skype and Citymapper at their early stages. Before moving into venture capitalism, Seal held various positions at eBay and Ocado.

Hannah Seal
Source: Index Ventures
Carolina Brochado was promoted to the position of partner at Atomico at the start of 2017. Atomico is the venture capital fund started by Skype and Kazaa founder Niklas Zennström. The firm is headquartered in London, where Brochado is based, with more offices in Beijing, Istanbul, São Paulo, and Tokyo. Within Atomico, her investment practice focuses on fintech, food, healthcare and marketplace businesses. Some of the companies within Atomico’s portfolio that Brochado works with are Fat Lama, where you can rent any of your belongings for some extra income or borrow from other users to save money; and LendInvest, a property lending and investment platform. She also sits on the board of Gympass, Streetbees, Hinge Health and OnTruck.
Before moving into venture capitalism, she worked in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and private equity at Madison Dearborn Partners. Brochado holds dual citizenship in Brazil and the US and speaks fluent English, Portuguese and Spanish as well as being skilled at French. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Carolina Brochado
Source: Atomico

Tiffany Young
Source: Pentech

Luciana Lixandru
Source: Tech Crunch
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