WOMAN SPECIAL... This One's for the Girls

This One's for the Girls   Ankita Vashistha is going where no venture capitalist in India has gone  before, by launching a fund exclusively to empower women As a managing partner at venture capital firm Tholons Capital, Ankita Vashistha  is also a member of various angel groups and associations. At meetings, where she was often also the only woman investor, she be gan noticing that even though some of the startups had been cofounded by women, they never came forward to pitch. “I want ed to create a platform where women are made to take the first step.This fund actively encourages women to take the leading role, not just a supporting role,“ says the 29-year-old founder of Saha Fund, a first of-its-kind venture capital fund in the country that will be focusing on promoting women entrepreneurs. The fund is raising an initial corpus of  `100 crore, and investors include former Infosys chief financial officer and serial angel investor Mohandas Pai, Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and former Accenture India chairman Avinash Vashistha, who is also Ankita's father. Saha, says Vashista at the Tholons Capital office in Bengaluru, will not restrict  itself to startups founded by women: it will also put money into startups where the senior management includes women, startups that make products and services targeted at women and companies where over half of the workforce is female. “We're investing in the best women talent available in the country. And the best talent supporting and impacting women in the country. “ Cofounder and chief financial officer Usha Amin says she came on board  because she too had been looking to do something in the space. “Women face a lot of challenges, starting with a lack of belief in themselves to a lack of funds.  I've come across women who are very talented but do not have ac cess to funds, “ says Amin. The ticket size is between `1.5 crore and `6 crore and the fund has already signed term sheets with five startups. Vashistha, who has eight years' experience in the private equity and venture capital (VC) space, is now in the process of getting more top chief executive officers (CEO) to be part of the  initiative and also act as mentors to the startups. Mazumdar-Shaw says she can empathise with the fund and its aim of catalysing startups led by women. “Women, in general, find it hard to access capital and I believe Saha Fund will enable that process,“ says the Biocon head, who was refused loans by banks when she was looking for finance when she started out.  “Some of the financiers I approached even went as far as suggesting that I name my father as my custodian to obtain a loan.“ Subtle Bias Mazumdar-Shaw might be talking about the late 1970s but the question is whether things are much better for women looking to launch their own business  today amid the overwhelming euphoria over startups. Availa ble data is not too promising -according to the 2015 Global Women Entrepreneur  Scorecard, India ranked 30th in a list of 31 countries when it came to the rate of engagement of women in startups and 28th when it came to women's access to funda mental resources. But opinion is divided. “At the end of the day, it's the con viction in the business,  the market size and the opportu nity that matter, not who is coming to pitch. From that point of view, gender doesn't really matter,“ says Alok Goel, managing partner of SAIF Partners. But he agrees that there are fewer women coming forward in the ecosystem ­ for every 10 men who come to pitch, there might be a cou ple of women, he says. Richa Kar, founder of on line lingerie retailer Zivame which recently raised `250 crore in series-C funding, doesn't think she has faced discrimination. “For every yes I get, there are 10 no's, and it's hard to say why they were no's. It's never occurred to me to think about whether it's because I'm a woman,“ says Kar. But there may be a more subtle sexism at play. Like the clients who will only talk to the startup's business development officer though the CEO is present, because the CEO is a woman and her colleague, a man.Or the VCs who ask a 34-year-old if she can run the company because she's a woman. Or the deals that fall through because investors insist that the woman founder sign a contract that she will not get married for the next two years, which Vashistha says she has been told about. “It's not about whether VCs will fund or not -I'm sure they will, if they feel it's the right idea,“ says Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence-based startup Mad Street Den. “The problem is why we are not seeing more women VCs at events, at panel discussions. That's why I think this new fund is brilliant because the answer is to add more women to the mix.“ The Pipeline Problem But not everyone is convinced that a fund like Saha might be the answer to the gender disparity in the startup ecosystem. “I think it's putting the cart before the horse at this point. Before creating a venture fund for women, you need to create an ecology that's conducive for women to become entrepreneurs, which is singularly missing in India,“ says Nandini Vaidyanathan, chairman and managing director of Carma Venture Services, which mentors entrepreneurs. Serial entrepreneur and investor K Ganesh says the actual statistical availability of people in percentage terms is skewed towards men right at the beginning of the funnel. “But initiatives like this are very encouraging, till the time we are able to correct the inequality right from the start.“ Mad Street Den's Asokan is more forthright. “It's a step. The change has to be systemic but at this point, I'll take anything.“ Indulekha Aravind ETM27SEP15