August 9, 2024
Citrine Angels and Okeanos Ventures Management Join Forces to Fund More Female Founders Nationwide
Today, we are thrilled to announce a new partnership with Citrine Angels (Citrine). Centered around a joint vision of supporting more female-founded startups and making venture and angel investing more accessible, Citrine and Okeanos will join forces to fund more women entrepreneurs and expand investment opportunities for women nationwide.
Founded in 2019 and based in Washington D.C., Citrine’s mission is to increase the number of female investors funding female-founded businesses.. Citrine currently has 80 accomplished female executive members, with one-third of those members identifying as BIPOC, including nearly half of the Board. Through the organization, its members have invested more than $1million in more than 20 female-founded startups over the past five years, including Healium, Madison Reed and Mosie Baby.
Likewise, Okeanos’ mission is to increase its focus on female and underrepresented founders, including those from BIPOC communities. In the past two years, we’ve had a surge of funding for female founders, including significant investments in portfolio companies like Veda Data, Alethea, AttuneIoT (formerly SenseWare) and more.
Similar to Citrine, another key cornerstone of the Okeanos mission is to increase support for new female investors. Currently, about 10%of our members are female -- a percentage that continues even as we’ve rapidly escalated our growth over the past year. As we add approximately 10 new members a month, only about 1-2 are women.
Unfortunately, 10% is a pretty common percentage across the world of VC, tech and Fortune 500 businesses:
- Fortune recently publish edits annual Fortune 500 report, showing 52 (or 10.4%) out of the Fortune 500 companies are led by women
- Women make up 11% of investing partners(GP-level) at VC firms
- U.S. startups founded solely by women received only 2.1% of VC funding, according to Pitchbook (if we look at startups with at least one female co-founder, the number improves to 23%in 2023, up from 18% in 2022); more concerningly, only .5% of venture funding in the U.S. went to Black-founded startups in 2023
This gender gap in VC matters – a lot – because of the role investors play in choosing which products, services, innovations, and ideas will shape the way we all work, play, and live. The inventions and companies receiving funding and support are the ones that will drive our economy and influence our society. Likewise, the leaders at the top blue-chip companies influence the global financial market, our culture, and the next generation of managers. It’s also been shown time and again that female VCs and investors outperform men when it comes to investment decisions and that female-founded startups have a higher trajectory for success.
So what does this new Okeanos and Citrine partnership mean? It means we will be hosting joint pitch dinners with all female-founder lineups, collaborating on educational and networking sessions for female investors, and ultimately funding and supporting many more women entrepreneurs. The collective networks within the Okeanos and Citrine groups will offer expanded resources and expertise to help nurture and grow these ventures so they can continue to foster positive change in this world. When we share collective experiences, knowledge, and insights across talented groups of people, we have the potential to make powerful and far-reaching change.
For Okeanos, this new partnership means we will further commit to diversify our member base and the founders we fund. We look forward to doing our part to close the gender gap and move the needle much higher than10% across the board when it comes to female-founded VC-backed startups and women investors. Follow along and learn more at Citrine and Okeanos!