Venture Voices: Women Leading Change in Startups and Capital with Winsome Kirton and Tatijana Janko
As women-founded companies receive only 2% of venture funding year after year, it’s more important than ever for women founders and women venture capitalists to band together to reshape what it means to be an investor and an entrepreneur. Winsome Kirton and Tatijana Janko are two women advocating for and leading this change. They’re here today to discuss diversity in investment, their experiences with bias in the investment space, and more. This week’s episode 121 of How Women Inspire Podcast is about women leading change in startups and capital!
In this episode of How Women Inspire Podcast, Winsome Kirton and Tatijana Janko are sharing the importance of investing in diverse women founders, both ethically and financially and actionable steps you can take right now to begin investing with your values.
Winsome Kirton is the founder and CEO of Heard.io, a B2B ecosystem that drives and measures social impact by connecting businesses with companies that meet their ESG goals. After working as a media director and working on her first startup, Pack Elephant, Winsome realized how difficult it was to work with small and diverse-owned businesses on a big scale. She started Heard.io to combat those difficulties and allow companies to shop thoughtfully and intentionally for their corporate gifting needs.
Tatijana Janko is the Founder and General Partner at Fjor venture capital. She most recently was a Mucker Capital backed founder of a software startup built for managing workflows of matrixed investment teams. As a fintech entrepreneur and independent sponsor she closed $56M in investments and helped to secure securitization and forward flow arrangements for insurance companies and hedge funds.
Some of the talking points Julie, Winsome, and Tatijana go over in this episode include:
New Table’s mission to get 10,000 women investing.
The challenges of being a black woman entrepreneur.
The importance of amplifying women-owned and founded companies.
The grit and unique perspectives offered by immigrant entrepreneurs.
To learn more and join The New Table, visit the How Women Lead website today!
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At https://applepaycasino14.de, the odds are stacked by design, and that’s uncomfortably close to how venture funding looks for women founders, but Tatijana closing $56M as an independent sponsor shows the other path is real. It made me realize I should be more deliberate about where my own money sits, even in small decisions that feel separate from startup investing.
When I first looked into small-business financing, titan funding group stood out only after I started comparing real borrower experiences rather than relying on the promotional summary. I wanted to know how the application moved, which documents were requested, how communication worked, what the payment schedule looked like, and whether the terms stayed clear from start to finish. A friend had recently gone through a financing process, so I had seen how useful a written timeline can be. That made me value detailed reviews with dates and concrete steps. The women-and-capital source feels relevant because funding decisions often depend on preparation as much as the offer itself. For me, the most useful reputation signal is a calm description of what happened…
In Among Us Online, I've been following investment field for a long time and find the insights shared about the biases in fundraising very accurate. The initiatives they mention further motivate you to learn more about investing for female founders.