Mastersfund™ and Women in Cloud accelerator program announced a new collaboration to foster and further success among women founders of technology companies worldwide.

Through this collaboration, Masterfund will support the Women in Cloud accelerator program with capital raise and corporate governance curriculum, actively seek to fund graduates who achieve revenue and other business goals, and provide pathways and introductions to later stage capital through Mastersfund’s global community of investment colleagues.

Gillian Muessig, Managing Director of the Mastersfund, spells out the extreme hurdles faced by female founders. “The sad truth is that conventional venture capital has, and continues to, fail to fund female founders and people of color of all genders. Over 75+ years of VC funding, women still receive barely 2% of venture capital. Even when women get some scraps at the VC tables, the inequities are huge. Men see 84% higher valuations than women. Yet, women leaders are 66% more capital efficient, they create 78¢ in additional revenue for every dollar invested vs 31¢ created by their male counterparts, and stunningly, women-led companies return an average of 35% higher ROI to their investors. It is often said that “money follows the money”. Clearly, venture capital is the exception.”

The collaboration combines the impact of education and access provided by Women in Cloud with the capital, advisory support, and access to later stage capital by Mastersfund to make serious inroads to improving this story.

“We are excited to have a funding partner to inform our cohort companies as to what is required to land early-stage growth capital, as well as broaden their understanding of the variety of capital available to them,” said Chaitra Vedullapalli, Co-Founder and President of Women in Cloud.

Founded in 2018 with the goal of creating a billion dollars of access for women-led technology companies, Women in Cloud provides a six-month cloud co-sell accelerator program focused on helping women-led technology companies to launch, expand, and optimize sales into enterprise organizations and the Cloud hyperscaler partner networks. Microsoft has been a longtime supporter of the program, opening more than 350,000 partners worldwide to the cohort companies. Accenture, Avanade, Teradata and others have also opened their partner networks to provide access to new business opportunities to WiC companies.

Mastersfund invests in women-led technology companies and made its first investment in August of 2021. The Fund has since added four more investments, including three companies that have graduated from the WiC program. Mastersfund targets venture-scale returns, using a revenue-based funding model and works with companies at the late seed stage, when there is a product in the market, with first revenues in house.

“Our investment model better serves both investors and entrepreneurs,” said Gillian Muessig, managing director of the Mastersfund. “We are able to significantly mitigate risk and provide earlier, steadier returns while ensuring that our portfolio companies have access to affordable capital and an ‘off ramp’ to return ROI to the Fund.”

Both Women in Cloud and Mastersfund focus on helping companies increase sales and gross margins to reach profitability and stability.

“This is a very different business model than conventional venture capital investment models,” said Anne Kennedy, Managing Director of the Mastersfund. “Our goal is to capitalize companies that will become solid, mid-size corporations, as well as companies that may go on to raise Series A and later stage capital in the hopes of future exits.”

About Women in Cloud
Women in Cloud, a community-led economic development organization taking action to generate $1B in net new global economic access for women entrepreneurs and professionals in the enterprise ecosystem by 2030 through partnerships with the world’s leading fortune brands, corporations, community leaders, and policymakers.

About Mastersfund™
Mastersfund is a venture capital investment firm based in Seattle, WA which invests in women-led, revenue-positive technology companies using a Redeemable Preferred Warrant for early-stage investments and conventional venture capital for later stage follow-on investments.

Contact:
Mastersfund: partners@masters.vc
Women in Cloud: cvedulla@womenincloud.com