It’s already been a busy year for the Female Founders Alliance.
The Seattle-based organization continues to march toward its mission of helping women entrepreneurs land funding and it’s getting support from key partners to do so.
FFA today announced a new partnership with WeWork Labs, the startup incubator concept from WeWork that opened in Seattle last month. FFA will house the second cohort of its accelerator, Ready Set Raise, at the incubator this summer. It will also host events at WeWork Labs locations across the country; provide its members one free month of coworking at any WeWork office; and offer benefits to WeWork members.
FFA also just raised investment from a group of backers that includes Seattle-area angel investors such as Sarah Imbach and Dennis Joyce.
“They are investing in FFA’s potential for system-wide impact, out of a belief that FFA needs to exist and that when female founders thrive, the whole economy will benefit,” Leslie Feinzaig, founder and CEO of FFA, told GeekWire.
Feinzaig declined to comment on the size of FFA’s investment. A SEC filing posted last month shows $200,000 was raised.
FFA is a social purpose corporation, a type of profit corporation the state of Washington created in 2012. It is funded primarily through partners such as Seattle Bank, Bank of America, Project W, UPS, and the Washington Technology Industry Association.
The organization recently formed an advisory board and appointed PayScale executive Lydia Frank as its founding member. It also added two members to its leadership team: Samantha Agee, vice president of business alliances, and Rohre Titcomb, director of operations.
Feinzaig launched FFA less than two years ago. It started as a private Facebook group of women who wanted to help support female founders and entrepreneurs.
Currently, about 2.2 percent of venture funding goes to all-women founders — a number that hasn’t changed in the past two years. Some point to increasing the number of female investors as way to close the gap. Recode reported last month that despite increased attention and discussion on this topic, “progress is only modest.”
