Investing with Purpose: Women in Capital Making a Difference with Naseem Sayani
- alesiag2
- May 15, 2024
- 2 min read
Less than 2% of all venture funding every year goes to women-founded businesses. But while that number has not changed in recent years, the amount of women actively investing has increased significantly. Our mission at How Women Lead is to create opportunities and access for women investors to help increase the amount of funding for women in the venture space. Naseem Sayani, Co-founder and GP of Emmeline ventures, joined Julie for a LinkedIn Live that we’re sharing with you today. This week’s episode 116 of How Women Inspire Podcast is about investing with purpose and making a difference in investing as women!
In this episode of How Women Inspire Podcast, Naseem Sayani is sharing the importance of investing in women-founded companies and actionable steps you can take right now to begin your investing journey today.
Naseem Sayani is the Co-founder and Director of Emmeline Ventures, a female-founded early-stage fund investing in ambitious female founders building businesses that are helping women, in particular, manage their health, build their wealth, and live in a cleaner, safer world. Naseem has over 20 years of expertise in investing and business-building, and has experience as an angel investor on her own.
Some of the talking points Julie and Naseem go over in this episode include:
The underrepresentation of women in venture capital and how the numbers have changed in the past few years.
How women-led companies perform better for their investors, are more capital efficient, and continue to grow despite challenges in the industry.
The importance and power of values-based investing.
Making entering the venture capital space clear and accessible for women everywhere.
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The emphasis on “access” really resonates—so much of this comes down to who gets invited into the rooms where deals and learning happen. I’d be curious whether you’ve seen any best practices for making angel groups more welcoming to first-time investors (without dumbing it down). Funny enough, this also made me think about how people try to lower the barrier in totally different areas — StyleLookLab — where the goal is turning something intimidating into a set of doable steps. What’s the smallest, low-risk way to start building conviction on women-founded startups if you don’t have a big network?
I like that this episode highlights investing as a skill you can build, not some secret club you’re either born into or not. The focus on women’s health/wealth/climate also feels like an “obvious in hindsight” thesis that still gets underweighted in mainstream funds. Slight tangent: when a founder is pitching and their deck visuals are rough, it’s amazing how much clearer the story gets with a quick pass using a simple image tool — not to dress it up, just to make the narrative readable. Anyway, would be interested in what metrics you track early on to judge whether a company is truly capital efficient vs. just under-spending.
The “investing with purpose” framing feels like the right counter to the default VC incentive stack—if you don’t name what you’re optimizing for, you end up copying the same playbook that keeps the 2% number stuck. I’m curious how Naseem balances mission-fit with market-size so it doesn’t become a false tradeoff. Also, the discussion about widening access made me think of how directories try to surface options beyond the usual gatekeepers — hrefgo — but in the AI tools world rather than venture.
I appreciated that this didn’t just stay on the headline stats, but got into what actually changes outcomes (more women writing checks, and more paths into investing). One thing I keep running into is how much coordination friction slows people down—especially across time zones for calls with founders and co-investors; I’ve literally had to sanity-check meeting times with an EST to CST time converter more than once. Would love to hear how Emmeline thinks about building a repeatable pipeline without leaning on the same warm-intro circles.
The part about women-led companies being more capital efficient hits home—every time I’ve looked at the numbers, the unit economics story is often stronger than people assume. I’d love to hear more about what “actionable steps” actually look like for someone outside the usual VC networks (syndicates, rolling funds, operator-angels, etc.). Random tangent: when I’m trying to reset my brain between meetings, I’ll do something mindless for 5 minutes — BlockBlast — and then come back to heavy topics like this with a clearer head.