Wayra and WA4STEAM, the community of leading women investors, have partnered to boost the role of women in the Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem. Wayra will offer WA4STEAM members content to advance their careers as investors. Wayra will also provide WA4STEAM's women entrepreneurs with access to investment, as well as the possibility of physical space at the Wayra Madrid hub to develop their innovative projects. Furthermore, to increase the visibility of their projects, they will be invited to company events to foster quality networking with other investors and entrepreneurs in the sector. With this initiative, Wayra aims to increase the number of women-led startups in which it invests. Currently, the average percentage of projects with at least one woman as a co-founder is 13% (18% at Wayra), and these only attract 1.8% of total investment in the market. Furthermore, there are few women in the Venture Capital (VC) sector. In Spanish VC, only 30% are women, but when we look at decision-making bodies, this figure drops by half to 15%. It is for these reasons that both companies are firmly committed to increasing the number of women investors and carrying out awareness-raising activities in society. To this end, Wayra and WA4STEAM will grant each other access to deal flow to grow the number of projects in which both institutions invest, thus promoting investment in startups created by women.
With this new alliance, Wayra reinforces its commitment to supporting entrepreneurship and investment by people, regardless of their culture, gender, sexual orientation, race or generation, which began in 2016 with the Scale Up Women program, to develop female entrepreneurship and promote diversity in this ecosystem.
“At Wayra, we have long been aware of the need to close the gender gap in the startup world. It is crucial to continue working to ensure that Gender should not be a handicap when launching a project. At Wayra, we believe that diversity adds value, and we provide support to continue catapulting women in the sector as role models for the girls of today and the women of tomorrow,” says Paloma Castellano, director of Wayra Madrid. “With a focus on women in the economy of the future, at WA4STEAM we support STEAM projects led by women, helping them become profitable companies. And with our female support, we eliminate the biases that currently result in women-led projects receiving less funding. All investors should do this: Europe warns us that achieving innovative and technological competitiveness requires significantly increasing the presence of female STEAM talent,” says Marta Huidobro, president and leader of the investment committee of WA4STEAM. id="">