Through our investment pitch events, Dorset Business Angels (DBA) helps presenters raise equity capital from our investment members. This brings our Investors and Entrepreneurs together to accelerate the growth of early-stage businesses.
Women Business Angels for Europe’s Entrepreneurs produced a report in 2018 called The Barriers and Opportunities for Women Angel Investing in Europe. An excerpt from the report says…
There is a clear appetite among women investors to back women founders or co-founders with a majority (54%), of those who invested in women-founded businesses having invested in at least one company founded by women, with nearly 20% having invested in 3 to 10 women founders and one female investor reporting that she had invested in over 11 founders to date.
This highlights the importance of this pool of women angel capital to increase the level of investment in female-founded businesses.
DBA’s approach is twofold:
- Support equality in all DBA interactions with female investors and entrepreneurs
- Encourage more women to attend our investment pitch events to understand the investment process
Our commitment to the Investing in Women Code
A report published in 2019 titled The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship highlighted the difficulties female entrepreneurs face when accessing finance and exposed gender gap in investment.
Many organisations who fund entrepreneurs, including DBA, have recognised that this is a deep seated and widespread challenge for the industry and have taken positive steps to overcome it.
Dorset Business Angels (DBA) is committed to a culture of inclusion and to advancing access to capital for female entrepreneurs. DBA has signed-up to the Investing in Women Code. Embedded within our organisation are the following steps:
- Frank Guinn (Vice Chairman) is the nominated member of the DBA senior leadership team, responsible for supporting equality in all of the Dorset Business Angel’s interactions with female entrepreneurs.
- DBA will provide a commonly agreed set of data about our investing activities and about our leadership team to the industry body designated by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), on the understanding that BEIS will collate this data and publish it on an aggregated and anonymised basis in an annual report.
- DBA has adopted internal practices that aim to improve female entrepreneurs’ access to the tools, resources and finance they need to grow their businesses, working with relevant players in the ecosystem, and will review these practices annually.
Female entrepreneurs interested in pitching at a future DBA event should contact us here.
Angel Investing for Women
In May 2021, DBA hosted an online event featuring UKBAA CEO Jenny Tooth OBE, aimed at encouraging more women into angel investing. The A-Z of Angel Investing event attracted over 40 people and was an educational webinar with the objective to raise awareness of angel investing among women.
You can read more about the event, read some of the transcript and watch the main presentation video by clicking this link.
Females investors interested in becoming a DBA member, should visit this page for more information and to complete the application process.
