iLoF uses AI and photonics to build a cloud-based library of disease biomarkers, initially focusing on the biggest epidemic of our time: Alzheimer’s disease.
How does it feel to be a winner of the Female Founders Competition? It’s an honor to be selected as a winner from such an inspiring and trail-blazing group of women-led deeptech companies from all over the globe. We are immensely excited to be able to join M12, Mayfield and Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures in the fight for increased diversity, and to be able to do our small part in supporting an environment of inclusion, openness and acceptance. As we begin this next phase in our journey with the backing and support of world-renowned investors, we believe we will be able to fast-track the development and deployment of our platform and our vision.
Clockwise from the top left: Mehak Mumtaz, Joana Paiva, and Paula Sampaio pitch iLoF remotely to Tamara Steffens from M12 at the Female Founders Competition Finals Event
How has your offering impacted customers to date? Using our non-invasive, low-cost and agnostic platform, we are transforming the drug discovery and development process, creating value for customers in a wide range of applications. In our main focus area, Alzheimer’s disease, we have enabled a promising biotech to validate a new nano-sized therapeutic biomarker. At the same time, we are providing a public hospital with a tool to screen thousands of patients for a clinical trial in a non-invasive and patient-centric way.
How do you plan to use the funding from the Female Founders Competition? We at iLoF are on a mission to enable a new era of personalized medicine, by helping the industry develop precise and personalized treatments for patients. This investment will be used to fast track our collaboration with one of our industry partners for development of a treatment for Alzheimer’s, while also accelerating our work in two additional verticals: oncology and cardiovascular disease.
What advice do you have for other female founders who are fundraising right now?
1. Find other female founders to share and learn from each other, leverage communities or build your own.
2. Identify female-led startup role models, reach out to them and get them to show you the ropes.
3. Be prepared, understand the process, know your numbers and practice, practice, practice.
4. Brace yourself for rejections and learn to reframe them into learning opportunities.
I’m excited to welcome Arkose Labs—a fraud and abuse prevention platform, to protect web and mobile apps—to the M12 portfolio.
In an increasingly digital world where success is measured by Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Daily Active Users (DAU), online traffic is a critical performance indicator. Unfortunately, not all online traffic is created equal. The internet has become a hotbed of global cybercrime as financial transactions and exchanges of personally identifiable information become commonplace.
Cybercrime is on the rise because fraud is a well-funded global operation fueled by deep knowledge sharing and sophisticated tools and resources. Year over year, fraud grows in frequency, size and complexity. Fraudsters have long been playing a cat and mouse game with digital businesses, rapidly bypassing their defenses and evolving tactics to maximize the ROI of cybercrime. Because profitability is the goal for purveyors of fraud and abuse, we are investing in a technology that is focused on breaking the business model of fraudsters.
Since its founding, Arkose Labs has been thinking about fraud and abuse defense a little differently. Arkose’s mission is to upend the fraud economy by introducing friction to fraud operations and—as a result—diminish their efficiency and financial returns. The more time and resources fraudsters and bots deplete trying to bypass Arkose challenges, the less time they spend wreaking havoc on Arkose customers.
Arkose Labs provides an end-to-end anti-fraud platform that delivers high fidelity detection and prevention with its flagship products: Arkose Detect and Arkose Enforce. Arkose Detect—the risk engine—unearths patterns across devices and networks in real-time for behavioral analytics and anomaly detection. Suspicious traffic will immediately trigger Arkose’s enforcement layer.
Arkose Enforce is a challenge-response mechanism that works in conjunction with Arkose Detect to authenticate unrecognized requests. Unlike legacy technology, Arkose Enforce is adaptive and purpose-built for fraud prevention; it learns from past attacks and adapts as Arkose encounters innovative attack schemes.
Above and beyond the business opportunity, the user experience of Arkose piqued our interest. Arkose introduces both game design (Arkose Labs founder, Matthew Ford, was a game designer) and security principles—two seemingly unrelated disciplines—into its product. By design, good users are intended to intuitively solve the challenges (such as rotating an animal onto its feet) with ease while stumping bots and fraud rings.
Arkose Labs’s Enforcement Challenge as it appears on Microsoft.com. One of the features of Arkose Labs is that the look and feel mimic the website it protects.
Arkose’s solution is a light deployment that seamlessly integrates with customers’ existing infrastructure and protects against a wide variety of industry-specific and business-critical use cases, including: account takeover, new account fraud, fake reviews, gift card fraud, scalping and spam.
As companies experience fraud at unprecedented scale, Arkose customers—including product teams at Microsoft, GitHub, and Electronic Arts—are adopting Arkose to protect assets and reduce fraudulent activity. Arkose protects EA gamers from bot-led abuse of its in-game economy. Microsoft Outlook issues an Arkose challenge when a user attempts to send spam. GitHub uses Arkose at the point of registration to verify authenticity of sign ups. Fraud prevention is not for the faint-hearted, but Arkose provides 100% service-level-agreements (SLAs) to prevent inauthentic requests at scale to demonstrate a strong commitment to its customers.
The product speaks for itself, but what really sets this company apart is the incredible team at Arkose Labs. Arkose founders, Kevin Gosschalk (CEO) and Matthew Ford (VP of Product), and their leadership team boast phenomenal experiences combating fraud. When M12 met the team, it was clear that customer-centricity and enthusiasm for Arkose’s mission permeated throughout the organization. CISOs and fraud teams dream of the day when bots and abuse in the online world dwindle to zero. Until then, we’re excited to be working with a preeminent organization making strides against the fraud economy.
With 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen first-hand how difficult it can be to grow a successful startup. Building great technology, recruiting talent, and landing customers are all difficult challenges that every entrepreneur faces. But for some entrepreneurs, there are additional hurdles that prevent them from realizing success.
Access to venture capital — a sometimes critical lever for company growth — proves to be one of these “bonus” hurdles, for women in particular. Early stage female founders pitching for capital receive on average $1 million less than their male counterparts. That $1 million deficit ladders up to a much broader systemic issue; if we take a step back, female-founded companies raised only 2.8% of venture capital in 2019.
While we have a long way to go in terms of sustainable progress, there are positive indicators of steps forward. 2019 saw the rise of 21 female-founded unicorns. The Wing Founder and CEO Audrey Gelman was on the cover of Inc. magazine during her pregnancy — the “first visibly pregnant CEO to be on the cover of a business magazine” — demonstrating a major shift in the public representation of a company leader. Entrepreneur’s 100 Powerful Women issue featured the women behind FabFitFun, ClassPass, Stitch Fix, Glossier, and more. While every entrepreneur’s journey is different, there’s a theme amongst many of those female-founded companies: they’re largely targeting female consumers.
Women focused on the enterprise with highly technical solutions were less of a cover story and more of a Cliff’s Note in 2019. Crunchbase finds that women building companies that offer gender-neutral products and services have an even more difficult time raising venture capital than their female-focused counterparts, amassing only 54% of the funding that female-founded, women-centric companies receive.
In an industry steeped in those systemic “bonus” hurdles for underrepresented founders, we announced our second Female Founders Competition to reach outside of standard inroads and identify those game-changing women entrepreneurs disrupting the enterprise. We expanded our geographic reach, added a new award category and increased our combined investment to provide greater opportunity for this community. The applications were impressive, and we were blown away by the technical expertise, customer-centricity, and passion from these founders.
In partnership with Mayfield and Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, we’re investing $6 million in four female-founded companies. But before we get there, here are our finalists:
A spinout from the University of Oxford, OQC has built the UK’s most advanced quantum computer — the only one commercially available in the country. OQC is now developing a unique Quantum Computing as a Service platform to enable its partners and customers to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from encryption security to climate change.
Zara Riahi, Founder and CEO; Contilio — London, England
Contilio is the world’s first 3D AI analytics platform, empowering the $12 trillion construction industry to close the critical performance feedback loop for big construction projects, saving millions in error and delay costs.
Jasmin Ravid, Co-founder and CEO & Dr. Daria Feldman, Co-founder and CTO & Hadar Shohat, Co-founder and COO; Kinoko-Tech — Jerusalem, Israel
Kinoko-Tech offers a mushroom-based alternative protein, created through the fermentation of edible mushroom mycelium with legumes and grains.
Dr. Carmit Yadin, Co-founder and CEO; ArcusTeam — Tel Aviv, Israel
ArcusTeam identifies, analyzes, and secures all connected devices on an enterprise’s network and gives the enterprise a holistic security overview.
Mehak Mumtaz, Co-founder and COO & Joana Paiva, Co-founder and CTO & Paula Sampaio, Co-founder and CSO — iLoF, Oxford UK
iLoF uses AI and photonics to build a cloud-based library of disease biomarkers, initially focusing on the biggest epidemic of our time: Alzheimer’s disease.
Enterprise Software — Global
Cristina Vila, Founder and CEO; Cledara — London, England
Cledara is the purchasing and analytics platform for businesses that need to manage and control recurring subscription payments.
Hagar Rips, Co-founder and CEO; Ladingo — Hod HaSharon, Israel
Ladingo offers online retailers the ability to sell cross-border effortlessly.
Hanna Asmussen, Founder and CEO; Localyze — Hamburg, Germany
Localyze is an all-in-one software that simplifies the relocation process for companies and their international employees.
Emma Rees, Co-founder and CEO & Kayleigh Kuptz, Co-founder and COO; Deployed — London, England
Deployed is a B2B SaaS productivity platform for the $3 trillion of services transacted via Statements of Work (SoW) globally.
Maayan Darki, Co-founder and CEO; Timing — Tel Aviv, Israel
Timing helps field service organizations better utilize resources and achieve outstanding efficiency and exceptional customer experience.
Ariel delivers precision medicine solutions to accurately diagnose, treat and manage complex diseases.
Farah Papaioannou, Co-founder and President; Edgeworx — San Jose, CA
Edgeworx is a Cloud-to-Edge fabric company, deploying, managing, orchestrating, and running applications seamlessly on any distributed infrastructure.
Ann Holder, Founder and CEO; Odonata Health –Minneapolis, Minnesota
Odonata Health is dedicated to improving the experience and outcomes of pregnant women and their babies while reducing the cost of care across the care continuum for women.
Michelle Zhu, Co-founder and CEO & Tammy Hsu, Co-founder and CSO; Tinctorium — San Francisco, CA
Tinctorium is a synthetic biology company making the world of color more sustainable, starting with the indigo for dyeing jeans without the use of petroleum and other toxic chemicals.
Riana Lynn, Founder and CEO; Journey Foods — Chicago, Illinois
Journey Foods is a software company that uses machine learning to bring on-demand science and data analysis to the $600 billion food market.
Enterprise Software — US
Gal Zabib, Co-founder and CEO; Altostra — Palo Alto, CA
Altostra has developed a cloud-agnostic SaaS solution that helps engineers build modern applications rapidly by automating 90% of repetitive DevOps processes.
Saujin Yi, Founder and CEO; Liquid — Los Angeles, CA
Liquid provides an all-in-one software platform that allows growing companies to streamline the way they onboard, manage, and pay their professional service vendors, contractors, and freelancers.
Cecilia Flores, Co-founder and CMO; Webee — Sunnyvale, CA
Webee is an IIoT no-coding end-to-end toolset, powered by AI and Machine Vision, that provides real-time insights, alerts, and recommendations to increase the visibility, sustainability, and efficiency in manufacturing, industrial and supply chain operations.
Jag Gill, Founder and CEO; SUNDAR, Inc. — New York City, NY
SUNDAR’s digital platform connects apparel retailers with global manufacturers, transforming the fashion supply chain by driving the speed-to-market, responsiveness and sustainability standards demanded by today’s consumers.
Advocat conducts conversation-driven legal research and drafting for the Legal Departments of Fortune 500 companies.
While we had originally planned to join as a community in Silicon Valley and meet these founders face-to-face, we’ve pivoted to a digital experience in light of public health concerns. As always, these female founders have responded with resounding resiliency, and will deliver their pitches via Microsoft Teams instead.
Over the next two days, this group of incredible finalists will pitch to our all-female panel of judges. I am thrilled to be joined by Mayfield’s Priya Saiprasad and Julie Wroblewski of Pivotal Ventures to learn more about these incredible startups and the entrepreneurs behind them.
We plan to organize an in-person event for this community still, but delaying these pitches was not an option. Providing more equitable access to venture capital is not something that can be postponed.
In its second year, the Female Founders Competition will help accelerate funding for women entrepreneurs globally
Editor’s note – Oct. 17, 2019 – The sentence below regarding Boston Consulting Group’s estimates of the global economy was updated following initial publication.
REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 17, 2019— Microsoft’s M12, Mayfield and Pivotal Ventures on Thursday announced the second global Female Founders Competition to accelerate funding for women entrepreneurs developing business-to-business software-as-a-service and deeptech solutions. Eligible women-led startups developing enterprise tech solutions in the United States, Europe, Israel and India are encouraged to submit applications beginning Oct. 17, 2019. Four winning companies will receive a total of $6 million in venture funding, along with access to technology, resources, mentoring and other benefits.
“Last year’s competition helped highlight that there are innovative female entrepreneurs developing enterprise tech solutions, and they just aren’t getting equal access to capital,” said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president, Business Development, Microsoft Corp. “The tech industry can’t afford to keep leaving women’s good ideas on the table. We need to level the playing field for female entrepreneurs, and together with Mayfield and Pivotal Ventures, we aim to do just that with our second Female Founders Competition.”
Venture capital funding, particularly for seed-stage companies, is critical to power ideas from incubation to go-to-market. Venture funding for female-founded companies continues to be nominal in comparison with dollars invested in male-only-led teams. Last year, companies founded solely by women garnered 2.3% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups, according to PitchBook.1
Regardless of this disadvantage, female founders continue to deliver outsized returns. In a study conducted by MassChallenge and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), women-founded businesses delivered more than two times as much revenue per dollar invested than their male counterparts. If women and men participated equally as entrepreneurs, BCG estimates the global economy could experience up to a $5 trillion boost. According to Gartner, “The enterprise software market will experience the strongest growth in 2019, reaching $457 billion, up 9% from $419 billion in 2018.”2 Investing in women-led enterprise companies is essential to economic growth and to closing the gender funding gap.
“As a firm with a 50-year history of people-first investing, we are always looking for new ways to discover bold entrepreneurs,” said Navin Chaddha, managing director, Mayfield. “We are thrilled to partner with M12 and Pivotal Ventures on this innovative Female Founders Competition, through which we will find and invest in women creating built-to-last enterprise companies. In addition to providing funding, we plan to share our playbook with competition winners on how to accelerate their journey from idea to iconic company.”
“I am delighted to partner with M12 and Mayfield on this important competition,” said Melinda Gates, philanthropist and founder of Pivotal Ventures. “Enterprise technology is shaping our world in countless ways, but it will never reach its full potential unless women and their ideas are equally represented within the field.”
Submissions will be accepted from Oct. 17, 2019, to Dec. 15, 2019, and are open across Europe, India, Israel, Canada (excluding Quebec) and the United States. Companies will be eligible to apply if they have at least one female founder, have raised no more than $5 million in combined equity funding and/or debt loans upon date of application, and offer or intend to release a product, service or platform addressing a critical business problem for a global market.
A live finals pitch competition will take place March 18-19, 2020, with the announcement of winners to follow shortly thereafter. Two enterprise software startups will earn investment awards of $2 million each, and two deeptech startups innovating through substantial scientific and research advances will earn investment awards of $1 million each. Full guidelines and contest information can be found at www.FemaleFoundersComp.com.
About Mayfield
Mayfield is a global venture capital firm with a people-first philosophy and $1.8 billion under management. Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise and healthIT companies. Since its founding 50 years ago, the firm has invested in more than 500 companies, resulting in 117 IPOs and more than 200 mergers or acquisitions. Some notable investments include HashiCorp, Lyft, Marketo, Mammoth Biosciences, Moat, Poshmark, ServiceMax and SolarCity. For more information, go to https://www.mayfield.com or follow @MayfieldFund.
About Pivotal Ventures
Pivotal Ventures is an investment and incubation company created by Melinda Gates. We partner with organizations and individuals who share our urgency for social progress in the United States. Together, we grow understanding around issues, expand participation, encourage cooperation and fuel new approaches that substantially improve people’s lives. For more information, please visit https://www.pivotalventures.org/.
About M12
As the corporate venture arm for Microsoft, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) invests in enterprise software companies in the Series A through C funding stage with a focus on big data & analytics, business SaaS, cloud infrastructure, machine learning & artificial intelligence, productivity, and security. As part of its value-add to portfolio companies, M12 offers unique access to strategic go-to-market resources and relationships globally. The Company has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London and Tel Aviv. For more information, visit https://m12.vc.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
Last week in Seattle, leading innovators, entrepreneurs and business minds came together to discuss best practices for startup funding and operations at M12’s inaugural summit. It was humbling to see almost 80 companies in our portfolio gathered from around the world, and to reflect on the progress we’ve made since we started the fund nearly three years ago. Our team has grown to more than 20 people supporting portfolio companies across 11 countries and 38 cities, seen four exits, and created new channels to ensure capital is reaching startups, such as our competitions to find female founded and led businesses and entrepreneurs innovating with AI.
In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, one thing I am particularly proud of is our pulse on the startup community, the relationships we’ve built there and our unwavering focus on doing what’s right for the entrepreneur. We’ve learned some important lessons, including one of the most egregious contributors to the poor reputation of corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) – terms and conditions like “Rights-of-first” (ROF), which we believe favor the corporation and restrict the startup.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. ROF terms restrict that for entrepreneurs. Simply put, ROF terms limit an entrepreneur’s ability to maximize their exit valuation. Stifling those options can be detrimental to a startup’s growth and consequential to the return profile of founders and all the investors. That’s why at M12, we believe ROF and similar terms are neither necessary nor valuable.
While we’ve always believed this, we weren’t following through in practice when other CVCs utilized these rights in companies we invested in, leading us to ask for the same during the first year our fund operated. And while we’ve never asked for these terms if the other investors didn’t have the same, in retrospect, we should have never asked at all. Since then, we’ve stopped asking for any special rights regardless of what other strategic investors held in the company and we’ve started actively educating entrepreneurs to resist these terms and try to remove them if they already exist.
We firmly believe that being fully aligned with founders is the only way to drive value to all stakeholders, including M12 and Microsoft. So, we want to go one step further. Instead of simply thinking, “What’s best for us,” we want to encourage the CVC community to start thinking “What’s best for all,” starting with adopting similar rules of engagement M12 currently employs to benefit the entire startup ecosystem:
M12 will not require any ROF term as part of its investment. Ever. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s good for business.
As part of our due diligence, M12 will evaluate the business upside not only for our fund, but also whether we can meaningfully help you.
If M12 chooses to invest, we’re with you for the long term, for your company’s lifecycle. That may mean different things at different times, but we won’t be driven by artificial milestones or deadlines.
If M12 chooses not to invest, we will explain why. We will also try our best to suggest other ways you can gain funding or other resources to grow your business.
It’s time to reinvent what it means to be a CVC and live up to what makes us an attractive investment partner to begin with – empowering entrepreneurs through investments, insight, and unparalleled access to Microsoft. The next time a founder asks me if we are a strategic investor, I want to be able to say, “It shouldn’t matter because we’re all aligned in fostering your success.”
