Fund for Female Founders Closes $21 Million Round
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
Halogen Ventures, the Los Angeles venture firm focused on increasing the woefully underrepresented number of female founders who lead consumer tech startups, has closed a second $21 million fund.
"With this fund, we will continue to prove out that investing in women and diversity are the best bet for allocation of startup capital and make for more economically efficient, profitable, stronger businesses and better returns," Halogen Ventures Founding Partner Jesse Draper said in a statement.
Female founders received fewer than 10% of venture capital deals in Los Angeles in 2019, according to an analysis by dot.LA using data provided by PitchBook. Only 2% of the $8 billion in venture capital that poured into Los Angeles companies that year went funded female-founded companies.
Despite all the attention paid to diversity in the last year, the problem actually got worse as investors poured money into big, established funds that are overwhelmingly led by white males. Established firms secured nearly 75% of total capital raised in 2020, the highest share since 2012.
Funding of female-founded startups fell 27% last year, according to Crunchbase data, and Los Angeles saw the biggest drop in funding in a decade for female-led startups in 2020.
Halogen was founded by Draper in 2015 and has invested in over 60 female-founded companies, ten of which have exited. Those include Squad App, which was acquired by Twitter and ThisisL, which was bought by P&G.
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Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
