Fellowship Spotlight: Emmeline Ventures

Inspired by the many history-making women named Emmeline, Emmeline Ventures invests in female founders building game-changing businesses that empower women in particular to manage their health, build their wealth, and live in a cleaner, safer world. 

“The reason those three things are important,” says co-founder Naseem Sayani, “is that we believe pretty strongly and know from our own experiences, if we can clean up the world around her—what she eats, what she reads, what she wears—and we give her more agency on her health and her wealth, she will do better, her family will do better, her community will do better, and all ships will rise.” 

“She” Is the Reason

When the three co-founders and managers of Emmeline Ventures talk about the impetus for their work, they refer to “her” life and the ways “she” deserves to live. The personal nature of this dynamic trio’s mission and vision infuses their work with a contagious and experience-informed passion.

Sayani first met La Keisha Pierre and Azin van Alebeek two-and-a-half years ago at an investor bootcamp run by Pipeline Angels. Van Alebeek explains, “The bootcamp’s core mission of changing the face of VC was the guiding light that brought together all three of us from our varied backgrounds and experiences.” 

She points to this guiding light as the core nucleus from which the group refined and developed their own thesis for Emmeline Ventures. The three were put on a deal to diligence a female-founded company. “We loved the process,” Pierre says, “but what we loved most is the way the founder responded to us.” Encountering a group of woman investors was a first for this founder, and it allowed her to feel more at ease, more comfortable being honest and authentic without molding herself into the image of a “conventional” founder. 

A Common Theme Across Diverse Experiences

Though they share a common gender identity, Pierre, van Alebeek, and Sayani possess a great deal of diversity among them. Pierre explains, “I’m from an African background; Naseem, Indian background; and Azin, Iranian background. Not even to add the age diversity: 30s, 40s, and 50s.” And their career journeys have also been quite different. Yet despite their many differences, all three co-founders encountered the same underlying issue: underrepresentation and lack of investment in women. 

Based in New York City, Pierre previously built and scaled one of West Africa’s largest media companies, based in Nigeria and currently reaching up to 50 million people monthly. In her pursuit of capital to support this company, in a time when there were even fewer female and/or Black investors, Pierre found herself fielding questions that had very little to do with the work itself. Instead, she says, “It was more like there was this doubt around me as a founder.” Pitching to teams full of men whose values, experiences, and perspectives limited the possibility of understanding the richness of the market opportunity presented by investing in women was a frustrating experience and molded her trajectory. “I want to invest in the next wave of women who are building profitable companies with outsized social and financial returns,” she offers, “so that I can help them get to business rather than having to field all these ridiculous questions.” 

Van Alebeek traces the seeds that grew into her passion for gender equity back to her earliest days. As the U.S.-born daughter of parents who immigrated from Iran before the revolution, she reflects, “I have the immigrant story and I’m also always reacting against the old-school, patriarchal, Middle Eastern culture.” After attending Stanford and then UCLA business school, van Alebeek worked in consulting with top executives from the late 80s into the early 90s. She then became a stay-at-home mom for two decades, which also shaped her perspectives. “I've seen the world from different eyes,” she says. “I know why I stepped out of the workforce. It wasn't gonna be possible for me to have children and have a sane life while I supported my then husband in his excellent corporate career.” And while she may have previously been more tolerant of the limitations the patriarchy places on women’s lives, she credits her three 20-something children with helping her to understand that, in her words, “What I accepted in my 20s no longer needs to be accepted moving forward.”

Sayani has many years of experience in innovation-focused management and consulting, having run incubators, launched products and brands, and started businesses and subsequently raised funding for those businesses. “In all of those contexts,” she reflects, “I was one of very few women. I was one of very few non-White people. And as you get more senior, the numbers get even worse.” As the only woman of color in so many rooms, she found herself disproportionately responsible for more work than the average employee. “I always led the diversity initiatives. I was always head of the women's network. I was always the one supporting the careers of the women behind me.” After becoming a mother, Sayani’s frustration over this lack of diversity and her inability to reach the people she most wanted to support compounded with the very little waking time she had with her son as a result of her demanding career. She eventually pivoted the skillset she honed from all of this work and used it to support female founders who didn’t have access to the same influential networks she was in herself. “I had to find a different way to activate my skill set and make sure I was still driving high impact while achieving the home life I wanted – transitioning into venture, no less demanding career-wise, is what made the most sense.”

The Launch of Emmeline Ventures

When that first founder from the Pipeline Angels bootcamp diligence deal expressed the powerful impact of pitching to and being supported by an all-female team, Pierre, van Alebeek, and Sayani imagined how much more impact they could have if they could support more female founders. “And that was the beginning of what later became Emmeline Ventures,” Pierre shares.  

The newfound team pooled their private capital and invested half a million dollars across 13 companies. “And with every single founder,” Pierre says, “we heard, ‘You're our fairy godmothers,’ or, ‘Where in the world have you been?’ We're not women behaving the way that VC traditionally behaves. We're disrupting it entirely.” After their initial 13 deals, the team closed out their pilot fund and invited others to invest with them by way of Emmeline Ventures. “Our thesis was proven out by the 13 thriving companies that we already invested in. We are the fund unlocking part of a multi-trillion dollar opportunity by enabling women to participate fully in the economy.” 

Van Alebeek points to how little progress has been made on gender equity over the years, saying, “Data for women in the workforce and our representation at top levels was more or less the same when I was coming out of college as it is for my three adult children right now.” Fueled by their intimate awareness of the challenge and the potential benefits, they got to work on their commitment to improve the health, financial well-being, and environmental wellness of women. 

Sayani shares, “Our intent is, yes, to invest in women for the sake of women, but it is also for the knock-on benefits that will ultimately come to their families and communities.” The team elevates the fact that, with full participation of women in the economy, we could unleash up to $28 trillion—or 26%—in annual global GDP by 2025. 

The Strategy

As of now, only 15% of VC firms in the U.S. have female partners, and only 1.9% of VC funding went to female founders in 2022, with even less going to the markets Emmeline Ventures is supporting. They are addressing this head-on. “We’re truly focused on finding both founders and LPs who are different from what is traditionally funded by VC.” 80% of the fund’s LPs are C-suite executive women, and 100% of founders are women, with 65% coming from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. 

Emmeline Ventures is investing at pre-seed and seed stage rounds, where female founders often aren’t yet tapped into ecosystems that will grant them access to the resources required to succeed long-term. “There’s a massive cliff at the Series A for female founders,” Sayani points out. In this crucial phase, the team intends to wrap their arms around female founders and help create the ecosystem their male counterparts already have, in order to provide the supports required for success and the option to exit. “We need to help give them a final push to whatever the exit will be past Series A,” says van Alebeek. 

With their interwoven approach, the fund invests 50% in FemTech, mental health, and wellness; 30% in FinTech, care economy, and the future of work; and 20% in nutrition and AgTech. “We couldn’t do just one or the other,” Sayani emphasizes, with van Alebeek adding, “The sectors are interwoven and very integral to one another.”

The VCI Fellowship

The VCI Fellowship has magnified and multiplied one of the most valuable elements of the Emmeline Ventures trio: the power of community. By participating, the team has gained access to an influential network that will provide mutual benefit to all involved. “The room we're in now,” Sayani says, “has magnifying effects on the kind of conversations we have, the people we can meet, the introductions we can make.” 

In addition to the ways in which this community can accelerate their respective work, there’s also the less tangible but equally impactful socioemotional benefit. Recounting the cultural disorientation that resulted from her dynamic and unique experiences, van Alebeek expresses gratitude for a cohort of people who have also experienced a lack of representation. “When I sat in that room on graduation day, I looked around like, wow, these are my people.”

We at VCI are honored to hold space where Azin, La Keisha, Naseem, and many others can connect and build with their people. We’re eager to see all of the ways Emmeline Ventures leverages their connections and accomplishments to continue to make the world a healthier, wealthier, and safer for women and for all of us.