A teenage boy holed up in his basement may be the image most people associate with gamers, but lifelong game-player Jill Wilson thinks the new face may be women on their cell phones looking to release a little stress.
Wilson, the company's founder, is trying to build a new genre called "lifestyle gaming" and she just got a big boost having raised $7 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by LVP along with backers from 1Up Ventures, Alpha Edison, Everblue Management, firstminute Capital, Greycroft Tracker Fund, Hearst Ventures and Third Kind Venture Capital.
"The concept itself is actually a new category of digital entertainment because it's not squarely in mobile gaming and it's not squarely in existing lifestyle content," Wilson said. "It's Pinterest meets mobile gaming."
There's the accelerators and female-founder dinners. Throw in the hyped-up "pledges" rallying public support for inclusion. But, for all the female focused co-working spaces in Los Angeles, the startup scene remains a male-dominated game.
The data tells the story. Female founders received fewer than 10% of venture capital deals in Los Angeles last year, according to an analysis by dot.LA using data provided by PitchBook. When it came to the money, women got even less. Only 2% of the $8 billion in venture capital that poured into Los Angeles companies last year went to female-founded companies. The numbers have moved only a fraction of a percent over the years.
Former BET Chief Executive Debra Lee said on Wednesday said she's looking into creating a fund for women and people of color in tech, inspired by experiences at her annual gathering of powerful women - Leading Women Defined.
Lee, speaking at the eighth-annual Upfront Summit, said she found fewer people who looked like her as she climbed the ranks at the Viacom-run network. And that led Lee to create the conference which draws power players like Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton as keynote speakers.