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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In the middle of 2005, Apple added a little-noticed feature to its iTunes Music Store – podcasts. A decade and a half later, the form is mainstream, with 144 million Americans having listened to at least one, ranging from The Joe Rogan Experience to Serial. But little about the technology or podcasting platforms has changed in the intervening years.
"The podcast is very archaic," said Audra Gold, founder and CEO of Vurbl, a Los Angeles startup that is launching a new platform Wednesday with an audacious goal of being the Youtube of audio. "It's astounding how underserved audio is."
Vurbl wants to fill the gap by providing a curated, one-stop-shop of the best audio on the internet, which can include podcasts but also goes well beyond that. For instance, Vurbl found people were frequently searching for religious sermons and bible readings but Google and Youtube often did not return good results.
"Millions of people are looking for it," Gold said. "So we started a Vurbl bible station. We have someone whose job it is to curate that content. We are just queuing up one great thing after another on a religious theme."
Other content on Vurbl's 40-plus categories include guided meditation, political speeches, courtroom arguments, old time radio shows, comedy sets and earnings calls. In all, the platform will offer more than 20 million pieces of curated audio at launch.
"All that matters is we are feeding people information on topics they care about," said Gold, who previously founded Product N, a product management consulting and recruitment firm.
Once people start listening to Vurbl, they will also be served up advertising that probably will not sound very different to them but in fact represents a significant step forward for how ads are usually consumed on podcasts.
Brands will be able to purchase real-time programmatic audio advertising to target specific categories and demographics just like they would with Google search. Unlike most audio platforms, Vurbl knows when someone listens to their ad, which Gold says has been a big sticking point for brands to invest more ad dollars in audio.
Spending on podcast advertising next year is forecast to grow 45% to $1.13 billion in the U.S., according to eMarketer. YouTube alone brought in $5 billion in advertising revenue in just the third quarter of this year.
"Audio is right up with video online and the ad dollars are a fraction," Gold said.
The new platform is being built with the $1.3 million pre-seed round Vurbl closed in September led by AlphaEdison with participation from Halogen Ventures and Ten13.
That's a much cheaper investment than companies who have created their own content. Wondery is reportedly considering a sale that could value the company as high as $400 million. Spotify paid around $200 million to buy Gimlet last year. Luminary raised more than $160 million to fund a subscription model but has struggled to attract subscribers.
For now, Vurbl will only be available through web browsers but the company is working on an iOS version it hopes will be ready by next month and an Android version to roll out early next year.
Another key Vurbl feature is the ability for listeners or Vurbl curators to easily splice up audio to share it on social media or post highlights on the platform. Gold thinks this will be popular because the best parts of podcasts often get buried inside 90 minute episodes listeners don't have the time to wade through.
"We're finding the good parts of podcasts and clipping them into playlists," Gold said.
Will creators mind having their work spliced and diced? Gold says they won't, because the clips will only help promote their shows. It is a similar argument Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post make when they aggregate a New York Times story.
"They still own that content and we only link back to them," Gold said. "We think creators are going to love having their content snipped up."
'We Can’t Let Data Stop Us': Why Funding Inequity Isn't Deterring These Female Founders, VCs
Women entrepreneurs, especially those of color, don't have the same buy-in from investors as their male counterparts, but that shouldn't deter them. That's the advice of four women startup founders and investors during a panel on equity at The dot.LA Summit.
"We can't let the data stop us, especially as women," said Morgan DeBaun, founder and CEO of Blavity, who said she hit roadblocks six years ago when trying to get her media company geared toward Black millennials funded.
The panel, "Locked Out in Lockdown," also featuring Bonfire Ventures principal Jennifer Richard, Halogen Ventures General Partner Jesse Draper and Suma Wealth co-founder and CEO Beatriz Acevedo, explored the deep inequities that remain for women.
Earlier this week, dot.LA's Tami Abdollah, who hosted the event, reported that VC investment in female-founded companies in Los Angeles dropped 70% in the third quarter compared to last year. Meanwhile, all male-founded companies saw a bump of 385%.
"As our country is going through a movement, after Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, there has been a much bigger emphasis on diversity of race," Richard said. "Of course I want more women to have access to capital, but when you look at the access to white women versus Black women, it's still very different. There's no equality until everyone is getting it."
The investment world is largely dominated by white men and has been under fire for failing to diversify. Pitchbook has no data on people of color, a point panelists said underscores just how far female founders and investors of color are from reaching equity.
Draper, who invests in early-stage, female-funded tech companies, said backing diverse companies is a smart investment that few firms are making. In September, she published published an article on Medium called "Investing in Women Isn't a Fucking Charity."
"VCs are all out there to make money," she said. "We're greedy, greedy people. If you want to make money, invest in women."
Draper said although she wants to see more investment in women-led companies, she realizes that this is a hard road for anyone and that founders need to be ready for rejection.
"I often do have CEOs come pitch me and say, 'Well everyone said no already'," Draper said. "Well who's everyone? Go pitch 100 and come back to me. If you're a startup founder, you have to keep going. It's a grind."
Acevedo said she often found herself pitching to investors who hadn't been exposed to the Latino community from which she comes. She said she often finds herself explaining her experiences to them. But, she doesn't view it as a negative, rather she sees an opportunity to expose investors to the community that she wants to serve.
"I thought, 'there's no one like me'," she said. "Nobody knows what I know better, nobody has my upbringing. Being me is my superpower. My experiences, my immigrant status, what my parents went through with their finances that now I'm trying to solve for my community. Be proud of everything that others might perceive as a weakness."
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