From Sifted.eu, August 22:
The story of Athena Ventures stretches across continents, and involves former bankers and LinkedIn influencers
Last August, Claire Walsh was looking for support for her startup, an ethical investment platform, when Louise McCarthy’s profile caught her eye.
When she reached out to ask advice from the 56-year-old businesswoman — who lists Bain, HSBC and Aviva on her CV — she got an even better response than she expected. McCarthy was setting up a fund to back female-founded companies, and Walsh’s startup looked like a match.
“I sent a pitch deck, and within three weeks Louise said they would fully fund us,” Walsh said. “It felt too good to be true, and I’m the first to say if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Nearly a year later, that money has still not arrived.
What follows is the mysterious story of how Walsh and more than a dozen other female founders and extremely qualified advisers got caught up in the plans for a new £10m fund that ultimately hasn’t delivered any money at all.
The bizarre scheme leads back to an ex-Goldman Sachs septuagenarian living in Istanbul and an investment company with an opaque track record and interests from gold to hospitality. It’s a cautionary tale about due diligence — and a sad reminder that the most vulnerable founders are often the ones left in the lurch.
The birth of Athena
When it comes to diversity, tech is in the stone age. In Europe, just 1.1% of funding goes to startups led by only women — a percentage that’s actually grown worse in recent years. The VC industry’s systemic bias against women is well-documented.It’s a number that McCarthy is very passionate about, as she told Sifted on the phone in early August. The self-described LinkedIn influencer — she has more than 35k followers — has worked at many international corporates and currently serves as a non-executive director and adviser for several companies.
“As a woman in business and an entrepreneur myself, I understand the huge challenges that female entrepreneurs face, because I have experienced them throughout my entire career,” she told Sifted later in an email.
She met investor Anthony Moore (who has nearly 23k followers himself) through LinkedIn more than a year ago. Turkey-based Moore is a financier whose current company, Evrensel Capital Partners (ECP), says it invests in sectors like the environment and hospitality.
ECP’s areas of focus, taken from the ECP website.
He told her he would back her in setting up a VC fund to invest in female founders. No matter that McCarthy didn’t have any investment experience, “her business experience was vastly more important,” Moore told Sifted, in one of more than 16 emails sent to our reporters in August. McCarthy, who Sifted also spoke to on the phone and over email, told Sifted she has 35 years of experience working with female entrepreneurs....
....MUCH MORE
