_SOUTHSTART conference to hear from female-focused start-up investor Samar Mcheileh

Samar Mcheileh is spearheading a push to support more female-led start-ups ahead of next week’s _SOUTHSTART conference in Adelaide.

Scale Investors partners Chelsea Newell, Roo Harris and Samar Mcheileh, and program manager Libby Briggs. Picture: Supplied by Scale Investors

A new fund to connect investors with female-led start-ups has been launched by an angel investor network on a mission to bridge the entrepreneurial investment gender gap.

Melbourne-based Scale Investors is on the hunt for cornerstone investors in its ‘Scaling Women’s Fund’, and is hoping to close on a $20m raise by the middle of the year.

Scale Investors was founded in 2013 as Australia’s first angel investor network investing in women-led start-ups. It was taken over in a management buyout last April by Samar Mcheileh, Chelsea Newell and Roo Harris.

While restructuring the organisation – including transitioning it from a not-for-profit to for-profit business – the trio has the same mission to support female founders, who they say, are often left behind by venture capital and early stage investors.

It is also about getting more female investors involved in the start-up ecosystem.

Ms Mcheileh, who will speak at next week’s _SOUTHSTART conference in Adelaide, said there was an untapped opportunity to capitalise on the current gap in the market.

“The issue with the lack of capital allocated to gender diverse teams is the access to networks, and to decision makers being people that look like you, because you talk about pattern matching and that’s usually the kind of pattern matching that you do at an early stage when there’s little data to go on to make decisions,” she said.

“We just see an incredible opportunity. We always talk about the fact that diverse teams outperform, irrespective of where you are on the investment spectrum.

“The data and evidence is overwhelmingly clear, and I think in venture it’s especially a very unique opportunity, particularly given the arbitrage in terms of what money is allocated to diverse teams versus their propensity to get capital – that’s really the opportunity that we see.”

Scale Investors has traditionally been run as an angel investor network, with its syndicates investing $20m into 46 start-ups since its inception 10 years ago.

The new fund is expected to include a portfolio of women-led, seed stage start-ups in a range of industries across Australia and New Zealand.

Scale Investors partners Samar Mcheileh, Roo Harris and Chelsea Newell. Picture: Scale Investors

Alongside Scale Investors’ focus on supporting female entrepreneurs, Ms Mcheileh is also a co-founder of Equity Clear – an initiative launched last April to encourage venture capital firms and other early stage investors to disclose their funding data and the level of gender diversity across the companies they invest in.

More than 20 Australian groups, including Airtree, Blackbird, Giant Leap, Tractor Ventures and Birchal, have already signed up to the commitment, and there are hopes that number could increase to 100 across Australia and New Zealand.

“If we get 100 VCs and family offices that regularly invest in early stage companies to start collecting and reporting on their pipeline and data, as well as their investment teams, and then to really start taking the steps to change the composition of those portfolios, we will start to see a huge shift,” Ms Mcheileh said.

Ms Mcheileh will speak at next week’s _SOUTHSTART conference, a three-day event that kicks off on March 5.

_SOUTHSTART director Danielle Seymour said this year’s conference came at a critical time for the start-up sector.

“Whether it’s proposed changes to sophisticated investor laws or decreased local start-up funding, there are challenges to navigate in 2024,” she said.

“There are opportunities too. At _SOUTHSTART our role is bringing together the great and the good from across the Australian start-up ecosystem, to have the candid, essential and often challenging conversations we need to have as a sector.”

Originally published as _SOUTHSTART conference to hear from female-focused start-up investor Samar Mcheileh