Larina Chen-Mehta, angel investor and syndicate lead at LWC Ventures, has spent years attending salon dinners hosted by networks of ultra-high-net-worth women. Meant to bring wealthy women into deal conversations for female founders and beyond, many attendees have significant capital sitting in accounts managed entirely by their husbands. When Chen-Mehta pitches them investment opportunities, she’ll sometimes hear, “Oh, that’s my husband’s area of expertise,” she told me over Zoom. “He handles the finances. They are just not interested.”
Women who disengage from capital conversations were often raised watching their mothers do the same. The behavior reproduces itself. The $30 trillion in wealth transferring to women over the next decade includes significant sums still effectively controlled by someone else.
“So many women, if their husbands die or they get divorced, they have no idea about their finances,” Margaret Hines, angel investor and co-founder of Navi, told me. “They have no idea about their assets. They’ve not been a part of the conversation.”
Meanwhile, Business of Fashion reported on DealmakeHers, a Hamptons gathering where senior women investors and retail executives convened with a mandate to make money, secure funding, and forge lucrative partnerships. In a climate of dismantled grant programs, cancelled conferences, and quiet corporate retreats from diversity pledges, women have stopped waiting for institutions to hand them access and have started engineering their own.
Why Female Founders Still Get Judged By Proxy
Consumer brands are where the “let me check with my wife” investor lives. Women founders pitching investment committees constantly hear judgment outsourced to a household proxy who may not even be the target customer. Chen-Mehta, whose two decades in consumer PR gives her a marketer’s filter, sees this as a diligence gap.
“Everything is dedicated to tech or healthcare, basically,” she said. “There are still so many consumer plays happening every day — somebody being acquired like Poppi or Siete Foods, Once Upon a Farm filing for an IPO. Not as many people are aware of it, because reading about Uber or Meta is more exciting, since those are publicly traded companies and people want to know. But consumer is very well alive and healthy, and there are new products coming onto the market every day.”
Investors who haven’t lived in a category compensate with pattern matching; in consumer, pattern matching almost always means defaulting to what’s already scaled. Hines watched this mechanism operate for 15 years inside Silicon Valley’s most pedigreed funds, from Tesla’s earliest rounds to the behavioral health sector venture capital still largely avoids. “They’re not going to take the time to understand you, learn you, get to know you, and see the capacity and capability in you, especially if you’re a woman,” she said.
Nhi Le, partner at Alpha Intelligence Capital, sees the identical dynamic from the deep tech side. When she backed a Singapore company making commercial yarn from algae and seaweed — yarn later appearing on the Stella McCartney catwalk at Milan Fashion Week — investors without scientific fluency couldn’t evaluate the opportunity. “People don’t think about those things as cutting-edge science,” she told me. “But you would never have known those things would have existed without the private capital that took them out of the lab.”
The investor who can’t read the science, or can’t read the brand, reaches for a proxy. The proxy is never as informed as the investor who did the work.
New Capital Pipelines For Overlooked Female Founders
“There are a lot of ultra-high-net-worth people who have tons of money, and it’s like, what is writing a $20,000 check to you?” said Chen-Mehta. “But they need to feel like, I’m making a difference with this money. I’m not just giving you money because I’m rich and because I can.” The framing, she argued, has to change. “Tell the women what they’re able to do if they’re coming to the cap table.”
Cherub, built by Jaclyn Johnson, who also founded Create & Cultivate, sold it to private equity, bought it back when the buyers ran it into the ground, and rebuilt it as infrastructure. Cherub, as Hines describes it, is “the Raya for deal flow, but for female founders.”
When Johnson called asking for funding, Hines didn’t hesitate. “I said, yeah, I’m in. How much do you need?” The pitch was irrelevant. Hines had watched Johnson operate long enough to recognize both a sure founder and a sure thing.
Angel investor Catherine Drummond Lake arrived at Cherub from the founder side. She discovered the platform while researching an investment in Couper, an online retailer whose founders posted a raise on Cherub. “I got on their website, and I was like, man, I wish I could have invested in Cherub,” she told me. “I love this idea, getting founders to meet funders.”
She eventually did invest, flying from Birmingham to a Cherub Founders and Funders event in Los Angeles, where she met Maggie Rose Macar, founder of Zant. Macar delivered what Lake calls one of the best elevator pitches she’d ever heard and earned a check to accompany Hines’ own investment.
“Did you ever watch the show Billions?” Hines asked. “Wendy Rhodes?” The character, a high-performance psychologist who keeps titans of industry from imploding, is what Zant now supplies directly to venture capital firms and private equity funds.
“We are actually giving Wendy Rhodes to every single venture capital firm and private equity firm,” Hines said. “Coaches actually de-risk investments.”
Data shows companies and funds with access to high-performance coaching deliver measurably better outcomes. If male-dominated funds keep missing human factors determining whether a founder survives scale, women will build systems to correct for it and charge accordingly for access.
Further upstream, Le has been building different infrastructure. At the Doyenne Evergreen Fund, a Wisconsin nonprofit backed by public economic development dollars, she sat on the investment committee specifically created to fund women and minority entrepreneurs.
“The systems in place that we have, the financial institutions, support infrastructure, societal infrastructure, make it very challenging for women and minorities,” she said. “Historically, there’s just not a whole lot of them.”
Doyenne was built to solve the missing middle of commercialization, where university IP is too early for corporate licensing and too complex for generic tech funds. Le uses accelerators, tech transfer offices, and family offices to push viable science over the line. It’s the grittier Midwest cousin of the Hamptons women-funding-women circle, backed by public dollars instead of private ones and doing the same essential work.
The Stress Test Female Founders Will Meet Before The Check
Ask any of these women investors what turns a meeting into a check, and they all come back to coachability.
For Lake, she’s first to admit, “I don’t really have a process.” When she’s asked her focus sector, she always responds, “I’m industry agnostic. I don’t really have a thesis. It’s just come to me.” Her investment thesis, she says, is her intuition.
She has met every founder she has backed except for an SPV her cousin suggested for a product she was already buying at Publix. Every other check came after a conversation having nothing to do with a pitch. “Listening to my intuition has never failed me. When I haven’t listened to it, and I wish I would have, I failed myself.” For a founder pitching Lake, the stress test starts the moment she looks you up.
Hines evaluates the same quality through a different lens. She worked on Tesla’s earliest funding rounds at VantagePoint Capital Partners with Elon Musk before anyone knew his name. She saw a founder who understood what he didn’t know and attached himself to people who did.
“He learned from some of the best folks in VC, the brightest minds, the pioneers of venture capital, right there in Silicon Valley. He knew who they were, and he attached himself to them.” The founders Hines backs now have self-awareness to know which rooms they need to be in and what to learn inside them.
Le saw what happens when capacity breaks under pressure when one of her portfolio companies scaled too quickly. “They were sub a million dollars in revenue, but they scaled so fast that they outgrew the system they had in place,” she told me. “They didn’t have the time or the foresight to build that system faster to support a $300 million or $500 million revenue company, and I think it caught up with them.”
The customers still loved the product, but the human architecture hadn’t kept pace with revenue. The founders owned it. “They said, hey, these are the things we should have done better, and here’s what we’ve already started.” That accountability, Le noted, is itself a signal. Founders honest about where their system failed are often the ones capable of fixing it.
Chen-Mehta learned the inverse with a wine company founder who refused every structural recommendation she offered. “They just did not want to listen. It was just, ‘this is what we’re doing.’ And sure enough, every time, it was a failure.”
She hasn’t made that mistake since. “I have since not done any investments with any founders that I don’t feel like would take good direction or be open to any type of feedback. That’s number one red flag. They’re not open to any feedback. Because you’re at such an early stage, and you’re just meeting me. Wait till you start building, get bigger. You’re going to meet other people who are going to want to take your company in a different direction. If you’re not open to that, then what are you going to do?”
The Capital Playbook For Female Founders
The current funding climate asks more of female founders than it should. It also demands greater precision in choosing who gets invited to the cap table. For a c-suite strategizing their next raise, here’s what to keep in mind.
- Know who can evaluate you before you pitch them. Chen-Mehta is the consumer diligence her male counterparts often outsource. Le is the scientific reader her founders can’t find elsewhere. Lake is the relationship investor who’s often formed an impression before you walk in. Hines is the institutional insider who knows exactly what a VC is and isn’t offering. Before you send a deck, identify which investors have proximity to your market, science, or customer to properly evaluate you. The ones who can’t speak your language with fluency will compensate with conditions.
- The pitch starts long before the meeting. Every interaction before the formal ask is an evaluation. How you respond to pushback on your positioning, whether you show up when nothing is at stake, how you treat people in the room who hold no capital — these investors are reading all of it. Lake funded two founders largely on what she observed outside formal pitch settings. Chen-Mehta disqualified founders for the same reason.
- Brand clarity is a pre-condition, not a deliverable. Chen-Mehta won’t help you find your narrative during the raise; she screens for it before agreeing to invest. The brand must know what it is, who it serves, what problem it solves, and how it speaks before the investor conversation begins. Founders planning to refine positioning with investor input have misunderstood the sequence. You arrive with clarity, secure capital, and use that capital to execute, not to figure yourself out along the way.
- Seek investors who can do more than write a check. According to Le, the most competitive deep-tech rounds see investors competing for allocation, not the other way around. Those founders built something irreplaceable and can set their own terms. When evaluating investors, ask what they can do no one else can. Investors who can only write a check should wait behind the ones who can also open a door, a market, or a government contract.
Chen-Mehta’s syndicate structure means a single well-placed $10,000 check from the right lead can pull a $250,000 round behind it. Compounding access is the new infrastructure women are building for female founders. With so many DEI policies rolled back, the climate may be more difficult than it was five years ago, but the pathways being engineered now should make it less punishing for those coming next.
