More women venture into VC investment space

BENGALURU: More women are being admitted into the rarefied world of venture capital, especially by smaller investment firms, although their presence in leadership and decision-making roles remains in the single digits, particularly at the top-tier funds, an ET analysis has revealed.
As gender diversity becomes a hot button topic across industries globally, and especially so in the venture investing community, the representation of women in funds overall has grown by 27-31% in the last 18 months, according to the data collated by ET.

ET conducted 10 interviews, sent across two different surveys to 50 women at India-dedicated funds and some funds that deploy out of their global corpus, and also researched publicly available data of various VC firms to arrive at the conclusions.

VC firms like Blume Ventures, WaterBridge Ventures, Eight Roads, Fireside Ventures, Bertelsmann India, A91 Partners, B Capital, Quona Capital, Lighthouse and Lightspeed Venture Partners have hired more women at the lower to mid-levels, while top ones including Accel, SAIF Partners, Sequoia India, Matrix, Nexus Venture Partners and Chiratae Ventures have lagged in broadening their leadership teams.


Shweta Bhatia, partner at Eight Roads (formerly Fidelity Growth Partners), says her professional journey got a leg up from the time she picked the right organisation early on in her career.

Bhatia started off as an analyst in the Class of 2000 at Goldman Sachs in the United States, where she says conversations around inclusivity, culture and diversity had already begun. “There were female role models...,” Bhatia told ET. “It helps when the organisation sees women in senior leadership roles.”

Today, she has given back, by hiring three women in investing roles. “In a team when you have two to three women, the dialogue changes,” she says, adding that over a third of the fund’s India investment team comprises women.