The lid has now been lifted on the second wave of funding provided through the Boosting Female Founders grant program, with no less than 38 female founders (out of a staggering 2,500 EOI’s!) now sharing in $11.6m of grant funding designed to further power their entrepreneurial visions.
With each successful applicant receiving between $70,000 to $480,000 for investment into their businesses, the timing couldn’t be more auspicious given that females are some of the most disadvantaged when it comes to accessing the finances essential to successfully growing and scaling their ventures. In fact, women receive a measly 3% of the world’s venture capital funding each year. It’s certainly no wonder then, that one in three Australian female founders have expressed concerns about how they will fund their business’s growth despite collectively owning a significant 36% of Australia’s small to medium enterprises.
It’s also no secret that the task of launching and scaling a start-up is even more challenging for female founders based in regional and remote Australia.
One woman who can speak to this is Bianca Tarrant, founder of Our Cow. As a young female farmer in a heavily male dominated industry, Bianca had 70% of her farm destroyed by bushfires and was working frantically to save not only her livelihood, but also those of other farmers in the Northern Rivers region. Through Bianca’s efforts, Our Cow was launched as a local provider of fresh meat. After just two years of operations, the business had demonstrated strong potential for scaling towards supporting the livelihoods of farmers across the country. For lack of investor confidence in female owned agricultural businesses however, Bianca found herself at a loss as to how she could bring about her vision for nationwide impact.
Enter the Boosting Female Founders grant, through which Bianca secured $449,542 for the infrastructure needed to scale Our Cow’s new Exclusive Eaters Club. In an Australian first innovation, consumers across the country will now have access to a high-quality paddock-to-plate meat subscription service even as growing numbers of farmers nationwide are supported with above-market rates for their produce. This is a shining example of the game-changing potential of grants to bridge the gap between a business and the next stage of its successful growth.
Shivani Gopal, founder of the mentoring business The Remarkable Women, is also now set to bridge that same gap after receiving a Boosting Female Founders injection of $310,000 to automate her personalised and female focused life, career and money coaching service using AI technology. As Shivani noted, the impact of winning the funding will be far reaching:
“...It will not only help us propel our business forward with investments in our technology but also help us partner with other companies and women in creating more female leaders, boosting women’s career opportunities, access to mentors, and ultimately a higher pay packet. The ripple effect of this grant means we can empower the lives of even more women!”
As a female founder herself, Janine Owen of the Sydney based grants management and education agency Grant’d has unique insight into the potential of grants having helped secure millions upon millions for some of Australia’s best loved charities and businesses. In fact, Janine and her team prepared the grant content for Our Cow’s Boosting Female Founders submission and supported The Remarkable Women’s development of a winning application via a strategy session and application reviews.
“As winners of one of the most hotly contested grants of 2021, Bianca and Shivani are perfect examples of the game-changing impact that a well-considered and prepared case for funding firmly backed by careful positioning, strategic thinking, and robust data can achieve. However, with a 1.5% success rate amongst applicants to this program, the message has been made clear, Australian female founders need more funding and they need it now.”
The need for more funding in support of Australian female entrepreneurs certainly continues to ring loud and clear throughout our business landscape with data clearly showing that the economy could receive an additional $25b if female founders were to be supported in reaching their full potential.
Bianca’s Exclusive Eaters Club provides an illuminating example of this in action. Projections hold that Bianca’s business will rapidly reach multi-million revenue as a result of the infrastructure enabled through Boosting Female Founders, with every 100 new subscriptions also set to generate two new regional jobs. Even as the business contributes to the Australian economy and jobs market in step with its growth, it will also pave a sustainable path towards continued scaling and eventual expansion into global markets.
This example of staggering potential return on investment, when placed in the context of an economy that is now working overtime amidst COVID-19, certainly highlights that the time is more than ripe for increased action amongst funding bodies when it comes to supporting Australian female founders.
What the nature of this action should be may become clearer when one considers the list of second wave Boosting Female Founder winners. Despite the minimum available amount dropping from $25,000 to $12,500, the majority of successful second wave applicants appear to be strongly established businesses with preferences also appearing biased towards proposals that not only incorporated technology but also exhibited robust potential for scalability and required in excess of $100,000 to do so. The question has to be asked then, what are the ramifications of these funding preferences when it comes to meeting and supporting the needs of small to medium sized female led enterprises in Australia?
For now though, Bianca and Shivani are now able to begin investing their hard-won funding towards driving their businesses to greater heights alongside 36 other Australian female entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, the collective attention of countless female founders across the country is now refocusing on applying for the third wave of Boosting Female Founders funding in 2022, with this opportunity representing another small step in the right direction for enterprising women across Australia.
PS - Click here to see a full list of this rounds winners - and congratulations to all
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