AwakenHub, an Irish organization dedicated to improving opportunities for women entrepreneurs in Ireland, has traveled to the US for its annual trade mission.
Founded by Sinead Crowley, Denise McQuaid, Clare McGee, and Mary McKenna in July 2020, AwakenHub aims to provide women-founded companies in Ireland with equal investment opportunities.
The organization has brought 25 women to the US for a St. Brigid's Day trade mission, with events taking place in New York and Boston over the next week.
In New York on Friday, co-founder Sinead Crowley told IrishCentral that AwakenHub has a "social impact mission to remove barriers to investment scale and success for women founders."
Crowley added that AwakenHub was launched to combat the "horrific statistic that 2% of funding globally goes into women-founded businesses and 98% goes into male-founded businesses."
"We've got a problem with that, so three years ago we launched AwakenHub and we've now grown that to 3,000 subscribers," Crowley told IrishCentral.
She added that AwakenHub supports women founders by improving their "investor readiness," helping them to work on business plans and how they engage with potential investors in addition to ensuring they connect with the "right kind of people."
Crowley said the organization has adopted a two-pronged approach to improving opportunities for female entrepreneurs with its women-led AwakenAngels program.
The angel investor syndicate, which features a mix of male and female investors, invests in a wide range of companies founded by women on both sides of the border in Ireland.
"We reckon we can build a funnel of really exciting Irish women founders on both sides of the border that have a global outlook," Crowley said on Friday.
She added that the syndicate aims to "democratize" angel investing by making it more accessible and more affordable. AwakenHub additionally offers an educational program teaching people about the basics of angel investing, which refers to the practice of investing in start-ups in return for ownership equity.
"If you've never angel invested before, we'll teach you every step of the process."
During its St. Brigid's Day trade mission in the US, a wide range of female entrepreneurs will pitch to a variety of successful Irish and English businesspeople seeking to invest in Irish companies. Some of the women who have traveled are seeking to raise their profile and make connections, while others are actively seeking to raise money for their companies.
AwakenHub hosted its first St. Brigid's Day trade mission in New York last year, with several women making lasting connections with major US companies.
Several members of the AwakenHub trade mission at the Irish Consulate in New York.
Crowley hopes that the trade mission will remain an annual event around St. Brigid's Day for years to come, while she also hopes that there will be other trade missions to the US throughout the year.
She said AwakenHub has targetted St. Brigid's Day due to its importance to women in Ireland.
"It (the St. Brigid's Day public holiday) is a relatively new phenomenon and we wanted to own that space from an Irish women's founder's perspective.
"Everything that Brigid represents, we see that in a lot of our women. They're driven to set up really exciting businesses that are very viable, but they might also have a social impacting mission or a positive impact on society. We're kind of channeling Brigid from that point of view."
Crowley said the long-term goal of AwakenHub is to create equal opportunities for women founders and entrepreneurs in Ireland.
She believes that the goal of achieving equal investment in companies founded by men and women is "realistic, but not in the short term."
"In the meantime, anything we can do to shift that dial upwards we see as a positive," she said.
"For us, we talk about equity versus equality. Once the opportunity is equal - the best person is getting the opportunity - that's good enough for us. But as it stands right now, that can't actually be the case. It can't be the case that 98% of male-founded companies are that much better than the 2% of women that are getting funding."
Click here or here to find out more about AwakenHub. You can also visit the group's social media account here.
Comments