The 'leap.club table' is here, take a seat.

At leap.club, we’ve had the privilege of building a solid community of professional women that includes a number of exceptional founders. Personally, I’ve interacted with some of them very closely over the last 2 years of building, and continue to get inspired by them every single day. Eela Dubey, Snigdha Manchanda, Aamna Khan, Aakanksha Kapoor, Gazal Bawa, Vidhi Gupta, Shikha Pahwa, Shubha Lal, Mitali Tandon and many (read: 800+) more of them, to be precise.

These women challenge the status quo every single day by chasing BIG audacious goals for their companies, and yet, continuing to support each other at all times. We’ve been running 2-3 founder specific clubhouses on leap.club since a year now, and we’ve discussed everything from hiring trouble, to navigating tough conversations to the big F word - fundraising.

But one thing that's stood out consistently over the last 20+ months:

While members help each other with 2 and 3 from time to time, here’s our reading of the room:

• most early stage founders struggle with access to angels and micro vc’s;
• there’s no solid know-how of ‘how to pitch’, ‘what’s an ideal first deck’ or how to do the first reach out/ ask for help that anyone teaches us?

There’s a lot of talk going on about the horrendous numbers for female funding and the ridiculous questions a lot of us get asked, but no one is walking the talk.

As leap.club, we realised we can do more to help too. In our own little way, one that we know.

First things first, reiterating the why:

As per crunchbase?- “venture funding in 2021 broke records across the board.?global venture investment last year totaled $643 billion, compared to $335 billion for 2020—marking 92% growth year over year. the figures underscore a dramatic change in the startup funding environment in the past year.”

Despite this dramatic change, there is one stat that did not move at all. Watch the video:

Our first step towards fixing this gap:

Introducing the leap.club table, that will invest in companies (raising their first external funding round) led by female founders via angellist. Here’s how it will work -?

• leap.club will launch a syndicate and lead investments as the primary investor.
• Top angels (Ghazal Alagh, Ankur Warikoo, Ankita Vasishtha, Varun Duggirala, Megha Chawla, Lulu Raghavan, Kaushik Subramanian, Ashwini Asokan and many more) have joined us to back the founders; along with Whiteboard Capital, Titan Capital, Enzia Ventures, who have joined us as venture partners and will fast-track evaluation of the shortlisted companies for independent investments. Thank you for always raising your hand to help, and more importantly, walking the real talk :)
• We will continue to leverage our extensive network and invite prominent founders, angels, investors to back our syndicate every month. We will also invite our 4500+ (and rapidly growing) member base to invest as well.

PS. this tweet got 13 members to invest in leap.club less than a year ago. Anand and I are still debating who tweeted first ;)

• We will open this up for all female founded companies raising their first round of funding.
• The leap.club team will work with the founders (and help in any way we can to prep them for the raise), shortlist and do all the backend work needed to get them ready for investment.
• We hope to fund 10-12 companies in 2022.

If you are a founder reading this, then please write to us at [email protected].

If you are an investor and would like to help us build a bigger table, join the syndicate here : https://angel.co/s/leapclub/lg3MK

Always all ears for any ideas on what more we can do to help as leap.club, slide into my DMs (jk, please email [email protected])

It’s time to change the rules.

Back to building ??