Boston-based Victress Capital, which launched in late 2015, is focused on early-stage consumer companies and tackles the long-standing and ongoing funding challenges women leaders face when starting companies. The firm’s first fund, worth $2 million, resulted in 14 seed-stage investments including The Nue Co. and Mented.
The group just closed its first institutional fund, Victress Capital Fund II, in an oversubscribed $21.7MM fund. While fundraising, they made investments in category-defining companies like Alyce, Rae Wellness, and WaitWhat.
“Women start 40% of the businesses in the United States, and they get less than 3% of venture capital dollars,” said Suzanne Norris, who co-founded Victress Capital with Lori Cashman. “So this is a huge market opportunity that we saw.”
Understanding that companies with gender-diverse leadership teams outperform those that are homogenous, they saw a massively underserved market opportunity and believed that with their deep domain expertise, they were well-positioned to provide the access to networks and capital that women leaders were missing as they built and scaled their businesses.
Within consumer, they focus on three sectors—technology-enabled brands, services, and marketplaces with the following requirements:
Their typical investment is between $250–750K in seed rounds, $1MM+ in Series A rounds, and they are comfortable with a wide variety of deal structures. Once the investment is made, the Victress team supports portfolio companies across multiple areas including team building, financial modeling, market positioning, and customer acquisition strategies, strategic planning, and operational assistance. They also help companies with fundraising to position them for a successful Series A and beyond.
