Female Invest Raises $4.5 Million To Empower Women To Invest

When Camilla Falkenberg was 19, she wanted to start investing. But she wasn’t sure where to begin. She was struggling to find the information she needed to make informed choices. It took her about a year to get started. Little did she know her future business partners, Emma Due Bitz and Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen were experiencing the same struggle. The trio met in 2017 at the Copenhagen Business School and hit it off immediately, bonding over their shared experiences with trying to invest and the passion it gave them to want to make the information they previously lacked more accessible. They wrote a book on the matter, “Ready, Set, Invest,” which is still a best seller in Denmark.

The women turned their passion project into a business and launched Female Invest. “The idea of Female Invest was born in the first conversation we ever had,” Falkenberg tells Forbes. “We thought that the idea of creating some sort of community for women to talk about money and investing and empowerment really had a lot of merit.” Female Invest formally launched in 2019 as a platform of resources about investing and a place for women to ask questions. It has since landed the founders on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2020 and grown to more than 20,000 paying users across 67 different countries.

The Copenhagen, Denmark-based edtech company raised a $4.5 million seed round, as originally reported in Midas Touch newsletter, led by Green Visor Capital with participation from New Theory Ventures and from angel investors including Mia Wagner, the CEO of Nordic Female Founders and an investor on The Lion’s Den — the Danish version of Shark Tank — and Fiona Pathiraja, a managing partner at Crista Gallis Ventures, among others. Pathiraja got introduced to the company by becoming a user. She tells Forbes that she joined after getting divorced because she realized her husband had taken the lead on investing and even though she was in school to get an MBA she still didn’t feel confident investing for herself. She reached out to the founders and told them to let her know the next time they were raising. They did. “Money touches everyone,” Pathiraja says. “It can be an awkward conversation if you are in a community where you feel like you don’t belong. I put an individual investment of $500,000 because I really believe in what they are doing.”

Female Invest offers articles, resources and live webinars meant to help its members feel confident in their investing. The materials are designed to be used by anyone regardless of background. The company has users ranging in age from 14 to 80 and from a vast array of professions including bankers and hairdressers. The platform is priced to be accessible. At $13 a month, the cost is comparable to other subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify, “We have created a safe space where women feel seen,” Falkenberg says. “All the knowledge and content is directly targeted to them. They feel excluded from the other investing communities online like Reddit because it’s bro-ish.” Female Invest does attract men as well, which Falkenberg credits to the startup’s focus on long-term investing as opposed to the gamification strategies typically found in other communities. 

While Female Invest looks to teach its users to be better investors, Falkenberg says the mission is more than that. “It’s not about helping more women get money, it’s about giving them financial independence and freedom,” she says. “That’s really what it is all about.” She cites a study by Nest, a U.K.-based pension company, from 2020 that shows on average women end up with a third less than men in their pensions. Female Invest hopes to help close that funding gap. “Most of these issues are systemic and won’t be solved in our lifetime,” Falkenberg says. “But what women can do today is begin investing.”