FoundHer takes on the gender gap in entrepreneurship: The InQbation Lab’s new FoundHer program gives women entrepreneurs access to resources historically exclusive to men
In 2022, Pitchbook found that venture capital funds given to women-founded startups made up just 1.9% of the total; women of color received 0.05% and less.
The InQbation Lab’s FoundHer program seeks to change this narrative. Starting at the end of 2022, FoundHer put three first-time women Northwestern faculty entrepreneurs through an intensive, six-week fellowship that included one-on-one mentoring with an industry professional, a seminar series, pitch presentation coaching, professional development, and a trip to Boston to meet with local venture capitalist firms and network at MIT.
The inaugural FoundHer cohort included Feinberg School of Medicine faculty Ruchi Gupta, founder of Yobee Care, which focuses on scalp irritation balms; and Julie Kim, founder of NUVitro, which is developing a multi-well microfluidic platform for studying organ physiology in vitro; and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, founder of Neuroplastica, a high-throughput drug discovery platform that measures neuroplasticity.
With only 11% of university startups having women founders, the ability to network with other underrepresented entrepreneurs is vital. “In addition to so many resources, they provided us with a powerful group of women to support each other,” said Dr. Gupta, “including mentors and a wide range of female entrepreneurs and venture capital leaders.”
Among the seminar speakers were Dr. Shana Kelley, Northwestern faculty member and President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in Chicago; Harvard’s Pam Silver, one of the co-founders of the institution’s Department of Systems Biology; entrepreneur Laura Schewel, whose company StreetLight Data spun out from her work at UC Berkeley; and Cigall Kadoch, a biochemist and cancer biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Center, and Harvard.
The second cohort, set to launch in early 2024, will invite graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.