“If you don’t have the right connections, you can’t raise capital,” says a very passionate Stephanie von Behr into the center of my Zoom screen. As one of three cofounders of Founderland, a nonprofit headquartered in Berlin, she is partially responsible for creating one of the fastest-growing communities of female founders of color in the world, which now serves more than 600 women in more than 26 countries in Europe.
von Behr met Alina Bassi and Deborah Choi while working at the Berlin Founders Fund, where the two spoke about “never really seeing women in the entrepreneurial field who looked like them,” according to Behr. They also had never found an accelerator program that focused on “negotiation and pitch-training, specifically.”
Startup founders face myriad challenges. But if you are a woman of color, your chances of getting that funding are next to zero. Companies founded solely by women made up just 2% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the U.S. in 2023—Black founders received less than 0.5% of it.
Building networks can help founders move beyond some of these boundaries. As Jennifer Jordan, managing director for Female Founders First, and Sonal Lakhani, global head of Programmes and Strategic Initiatives for Barclays, wrote, “An all-female, peer-to-peer network for scaling tech founders is a rare and coveted opportunity to help female founders reach their next level of growth.” In an opinion piece for Fast Company, the two said they believe these networks offer a way to gain insight into “both visible and invisible barriers female founders universally face and offer multiple routes to overcome them.”
It was also at Berlin Founders that the trio partnered with creative innovation company R/GA, when an employee of theirs mentioned they were looking for “guinea pig” companies that support women of color.
While Founderland does have an investor-readiness program in place called Compass, they can only offer a limited number of places. Now, with help from R/GA, they have been able to create a new custom AI application, dubbed PAM, which is scalable, and offers every founder a safe space online to practice their pitch and receive instant, personalized feedback.
I got to meet von Behr’s partner, Nick Pringle, chief creative officer at R/GA EMEA on our Zoom call as well, and let me tell you, opposites most definitely attract.
Pringle is a self-professed “technology nerd” whose eyes lit up while discussing AI’s rapid improvement over the past 12 to 18 months. While creating PAM, he says things that were “impossible at the start became possible by the end of it.”
PAM will allow users to enter their pitch presentation and present from anywhere through a webcam. This accessibility helps founders get confident quickly as instant feedback is provided.
R/GA also created PAM to include a pitch dashboard—a central location that tracks users’ progress as they improve their pitching, as well as an interactive live pitch room that simulates the pressure of a real VC pitch and enables users to get questioned on any areas that need more clarity. PAM is currently free to founders as they continue to explore plans to expand.
While PAM is unique in its very focused approach to up the pitch game of participating founders, there are other AI platforms aiming to help underrepresented entrepreneurs.
For instance, Hello Alice, cofounded by Elizabeth Gore, is a free data-driven AI platform that has helped more than 1.4 million entrepreneurs. It serves as a small business “helper,” guiding users to launch, grow, and scale their businesses. In 2023, 68% of their users were female and 37% were Black.
The Female Founders Alliance, now called Graham & Walker, serves a community of female and nonbinary startup founders by offering intensives, connections, resources, and more. It’s a place, says its founder Leslie Feinzaig, where an entrepreneur can truly just be a founder rather than a “female founder,” according to a piece she penned for Fast Company. So far, Graham & Walker has helped more than 400 women raise more than $100 million in pre-seed capital.
And Founderland, to date, has received $1.4 million in funding mostly in the form of grants from Google.org, the Creative Impact Fund, Brave Spaces, and the EU’s European Commission. Other donors include the Techstars Foundation, Launch with Goldman Sachs, AWS, Distill Ventures, Omers Ventures, Ananda Impact Ventures, and R/GA, as well as individual private donations.
As part of that overall funding, PAM received 200,000 euros ($217,150) from the EU Commission. Although it’s been in beta within the Founderland community since late January 2024, they hope to launch broadly at the end of Q2 this year.
Evolving Founderland’s product and service offering is an “honor,” says R/GA’s Pringle. “We’ve leveraged new technology to serve a genuine need for a community often overlooked.”
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