“Gender disparity in the startup ecosystem is a global bottleneck to sustainable, equitable and balanced economic growth,” said Aishwarya Malhi, Co-Founder at Rebalance.
Advancing women’s equality is not social charity but presents an economic opportunity worth $12 trillion globally ($770 billion in India alone), and a strong business case of better returns on investment.
Aishwarya Malhi and Vikas Kumar recently announced the launch of Rebalance – a new equity-free, early stage scale-up program dedicated to accelerating women in entrepreneurship and venture capital.
They believe in “a world where everyone can contribute to building a part of the future.”
Skewed investment and faith towards male-led ventures limit the contribution women founders can make, today.
Scaling up is twice as hard for women, Rebalance wants to change that.
After speaking to numerous female founders and investors to understand where the major roadblocks lie. “We realized, there isn’t really a pipeline issue when it comes to exceptional female talent but lack of investor confidence, mentorship, and accessibility which hurts the chances of large-scale fundraising for women-led companies,” said Vikas Kumar, Co-Founder at Rebalance.
Consequently, women tend to raise less funding. According to YourStory Startup Report for India, only 12% of women-led companies received funding and a meager 5.2% of overall funding ($9.14 billion) raised went to women-led companies in 2018.
Despite the disparity, women-led companies deliver higher returns on investment. According to a recent BCG report, teams with a woman co-founder performed 63% better – as measured by valuation – than all-male founded teams. This makes diverse leadership a better bet for investment rather than just a good to have.
Rebalance is on a mission is to accelerate the viability of women-led startups by creating an accessible and inclusive startup ecosystem.
How is Rebalance helping women-led startups?
Rebalance is an 8-week scale-up program that helps early-stage startups with:
a) at least one woman as founder/co-founder
b) tech-enabled/technology/impact tech solutions
c) minimum viable product/solution,
shape their ventures to a level where they can scale either through customer acquisition or raise Seed/Series A funding. They are sector agnostic and open to social impact startups as well.
Their inaugural batch for the accelerator will be hosted in Delhi NCR and applications are open right now! Click here to apply.
Why Rebalance is changing how accelerators have functioned in India until now:
They are equity-free
“Founders should not be charged in their quest for growth – just for getting accepted in a program. For us, it’s important that founders maximize value first,” said Vikas Kumar.
No founder is denied access to learning and growth through Mentor Hours
Founders should not be limited by our batch bandwidth or their startup stage when they reach out to an accelerator. Rebalance has introduced Mentor Hours — an initiative that provides 1:1 need-based mentorship to high-potential startups who do not get shortlisted for the accelerator program. This helps startups get in shape to either access our main demo day or re-apply to the next accelerator batch.
“We believe time spent nurturing founders and their idea is more important than filling up their bank,” said Aishwarya Malhi.
At Rebalance, there is emphasis on helping founders build solid product/solution credibility and maintaining growth focus. “Strong growth focus begets scale, and returns on investment are attractive only if, what a founder is building is relevant to someone, somewhere.” said Aishwarya Malhi.
“We focus on giving women founders the resources, access, and the belief they need to take their startup to the next level,” said Vikas Kumar.
Rebalance Hours is breaking the networking stereotype we all secretly hate
“It’s important for founders to build relationships, connections and capitalize on informal learning through our community. We host Rebalance Hours thrice during the program which functions like a town-hall with mentors, investors, and experts followed by dinner,” said Vikas Kumar. This allows founders the flexibility to reach out to mentors for any doubts that they might have outside of a session setting. This, also helps startups gain early access to our funding partners so they can find the right funding partner for their idea during the course of 8 weeks.
They understand that every startup has its own challenges
What might be relevant to one founder’s business might not be as applicable to another founder. At Rebalance, startups are grouped basis their startup readiness stage and each session is optimized for the founders. They also provide 1:1 mentoring for startups with our mentors, if needed.
Rebalance is a global community of mentors
Exposure to different perspectives helps us become better leaders, tomorrow. “As a founder, it’s important to understand the ethical, social, global and economic implications of what we’re building,” said Aishwarya Malhi, co-founder. Rebalance has a global community of mentors who are accessible to all founders for any help that they might need, through a simple introduction. Some of them are even taking sessions on video during the program!
They’re changing the air around fundraising and investors
“Any founder looking to raise funds is simply finding a partner who believes in his/her vision and sees an opportunity in his/her idea. The whole fundraising process takes way too much time and unnecessarily creates pressure on founders which takes the focus away from what she/he is building,” said Aishwarya Malhi, Co-Founder. After speaking to numerous investors and founders, we realized traditional demo days are unnecessarily nerve-wracking for founders and inefficient for investors. At Rebalance, we host the Rebalance Pitch Week — where founders can opt to interact with selected funders deeply, through our community and/or participate in an informal mass pitch with investors outside of the Rebalance community on the last day of the week.
“Rebalance Pitch Week doesn’t mark the end of our relationship but marks the beginning of our journey. Scaling up demands time and persistence — we work with founders, for as long as they choose to be founders,” Vikas Kumar added.
Rebalance is helping investors diversify their portfolio
Through their network of investors, Rebalance is building a Diverse Investors League – a community of funders on a mission to create an accessible and inclusive startup ecosystem. This gives founders access to a community of select investors who are consciously working to diversify their portfolio and looking to build meaningful relationships rather than just a demo day interaction.
Rebalance is creating awareness around the lack of diversity in venture capital
A lot of what we did initially at Rebalance, was researching this space and meeting founders/investors. It was fairly easy to find data and opinion on women entrepreneurs in the wake of the diversity and inclusion movement worldwide.
“What struck us was the absence of women in venture capital and how seldom it is addressed. 9 out of 10 decision makers at VC firms are male,” said Vikas Kumar, Co-Founder.
Globally, there is movement on this front but there is close to no data on women in venture capital in India and we cannot improve what we cannot measure.
Mind The Gap Project is an attempt to collect data on women in venture capital in India and develop a dashboard that helps the industry track their progress on diversity in venture capital and generate awareness about the issue.
“The times we live in, present endless possibilities to create solutions/build stuff that can shape the future. We cannot truly invest in the future if we involve only half the population in the process,” said Aishwarya Malhi, Co-Founder.
How you can get involved and amplify Rebalance and its mission:
a) They are excited to add Mentors and grow their Diverse Investors League.
b) They are looking for partners and sponsors who believe in this mission, for any or all of the initiatives.
c) They are looking to connect with women in venture capital who would like to mentor, participate as funders and help them co-create the Mind The Gap Project.
You can write to Rebalance at hello@therebalance.com and to find out more, visit www.therebalance.com.
To know more, read the original announcement on medium.
