 Hello My name is Anna I am one of the three co-founders of female invest and we are an Adtech company with the goal of closing the financial gender gap today We do that by educating women on how to manage their money, but soon we'll be launching a trading platform as well Just a bit of background information on why I'm here before I'm diving into why this is so important and Exactly what we're doing at female invest and where we're going. So I Co-founded female invest with Emma and Camilla my two co-founders We all come from backgrounds where no one talks about money No one invests and we all had to learn the hard way when we were a teenager So we suddenly got an interest in the topic Since then a lot has happened we have co-authored two best-selling books We've won the world's largest start-up competition We've raised around ten million dollars in funding and we've built a product with paying users in 89 countries And yesterday I signed the deal to buy a trading platform And we were also in Y Combinator and on the Forbes 30 under 30 list within finance as the first Nordic women ever And I always start out with my CV because whenever I go on stage and present this idea people always assume It's like a little hobby project in my mom's basement and I was sitting I was at a really nice dinner yesterday and I was sitting next to this VC partner And I told him about female invest and he was like wow, that's so great We also donate to charity. I was like, yeah, it's not really what we do What we do at female invest is that we try to close the financial Gender gap and the way we do that is by Educating women on how to make the most of their money and how to begin investing Because for us, this is not just about money This is about freedom. It's about independence and it's about the ability to live life on your own terms We do this through multiple ways The biggest one is our online platform when women sign up they get access to all the learning content They need to make the most of their money webinars courses everything Then we have a community and social media of over 250,000 women and we work with some of the largest companies in the world having global partnerships with companies like UBS, Natstack, Facebook, Google, McKinsey and so on So yeah, our business model has two legs today B2C is by far the most scalable and that is the key focus as well But before I dive into our journey and how we got to where we are today I just want to pause and focus on the problem that we are solving Because today there is 195 countries in the world and not a single one has achieved financial gender equality That means there's not a single country in the world today Where women have the same freedom the same independence and the same opportunities as men do and this is a problem Not just for women, but for all of us Whenever I hear these numbers, I feel like there are some questions we need to ask Do we lack skilled female labor because that would be a very good explanation No, we don't in Western countries women are overrepresented in higher education So that's definitely not the reason why Well, then surely the mom the numbers must be improving Not really at least not fast enough According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 257 years to close the financial gender gap and that number is only increasing after the pandemic and Every time that we see financial volatility that we do now women are hit harder Then the last question we need to ask is have we acknowledged the problem? I know the people in this room. We're probably smart. We work in the area We probably do acknowledge that there is a problem that needs solving But when we ask general populations the majority do not think that we have a problem with gender bias Which I think is really scary So that's why we exist in female and best and that's a problem that we want to solve This is not a company against men. We build it with a lot of men as well have a lot of male employees We just target women When we started out we never intended for this to be a company I just met my co-founders at university and we immediately bonded over this Passion for investing and this passion to get more women into the space and the first time that we ever met We got the idea to start this little club of women discussing stocks We imagined it would be like a 10 15 women getting drunk and talking about their investments And so we launched a Facebook page. We just called it female invest So women would know it was for them and the first day that we launched More than 400 women signed up and then the ball kept rolling What was really interesting is that the majority of women signing up didn't know anything about investing they wanted us to teach them So what we started doing is that we started hosting these educational events We started partnering with companies because we couldn't physically fit all the women into the rooms and within the first year and a half over 25,000 women had physically attended our events and that's in Copenhagen alone 25,000 women it eventually got to the point where we would post an event on Facebook It was sell out in minutes And then there would be this secondary market where women would sell the tickets at overpriced and that's when we knew that we were Really onto something because while we were doing this all of the banks were hosting women's brunches and women's events having just empty rooms So we looked at each other We all signed at that point contracts with our dream jobs I was supposed to go work at McKinsey we ripped those contracts and we started female invest as a company We had zero money to start it with no network no experience It was just purely out of the passion and driven by the demand that we experienced We launched our first online platform with two thousand dollars, which I think is pretty crazy We then bootstrap the company for a full year up to seven full-time employees Meanwhile, we won the world's largest start-up competition and we got an equity free check of a hundred thousand dollars Use that to hire some more people get a salary and eventually get to our first funding round of one point six million dollars Getting funding was and still is I think a really difficult thing It's a difficult thing for all founders, but it's especially difficult if you are a woman or if you are a person of color I think I don't need to elaborate. We all know the statistics and after having raised money. I'm really not surprised of that We then took that money and we relaunched the entire platform like the first platform We launched was the most scrappy product you would have ever seen It was a WordPress site that would crash whenever more than 20 people were online at the same time and we got to 10,000 Paying monthly subscribers on that platform, which to this day. I still don't really get to be honest And the growth just kept going when super well We joined why a combinator last summer and on the back of that we raised an additional funding round of six and a half million dollars Now when I made this slide we have paying members in 83 countries We're actually up to 89 countries now, which is really exciting. It's moving super fast Where we are now is that we need to do two things number one We need to scale as all startups do we're already growing fast We need to grow even faster. We come from the Nordics, but now we set up offices in London as well I just moved to London, which is a quite a big thing for me took six months to get a visa I have zero friends in London, but let's see how it goes My boyfriend was really cute. He was like, oh, we should host a housewarming party and I was just like for who But yeah, so we need to scale the UK is our fastest growing market, so we're just doubling down on that right now But then apart from scaling we also need to expand the business because Building and at the company is really nice But we want to do a lot more because the problem with engaging women in the world of finance It's not just about education. It's about a lack of women in the financial industry It's about the products in the financial industry not being built by women not taking their demands into account We see that both in the more established world among the more Established banks, but we also see it in fintech the way it is today I don't know if any of you can mention just one woman who has built a trading platform I Can't mention a single one. I know styling bank has a female founder, but I don't know any women who've done it So what we want now is to launch a trading platform I'm not lying when I say that we get between 50 and 100 requests per week from women asking us If we have a trading platform when we'll have it coming back to us after we send them out to the ones that already exist Saying that it doesn't have exactly what they are looking for Building a trading platform isn't easy, but nothing on this journey has been So as I started out with saying we just acquired a trading platform as of yesterday Which was really exciting assigned the deal when I was sitting next to the stairs over there And and we hired the CTO to work in our company. We have around 30 full-time employees now So we want to launch trading waiting for the markets to get a bit better We raised a bit more funding in the spring But now we just want to ramp up and and do a series a within the coming year all of this is Driven by a passion is driven by a passion to help more women to empower more women and Essentially to make the world a better place Because imagine what the world will look like when more women have more money Money to support companies. We like money to support Courses we like and money to never ever be dependent on anyone or anything That's what we want with female invest and that's why we've been working day and night for the last three years And we are not done until women have the same financial possibilities in every single country in the world I'll be working for a really long time as you can probably hear That was the time I had a bit about female invest while we're doing the things that we're doing if you want to get in touch Please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm Anna Sufi from female invest You can see me on the program. We'd always love to partner and then I just want to say thank you