WeWork and Capital Enterprise to support female-led startups

Co-working company WeWork is partnering with Capital Enterprise to build the first community of its kind for female founders in London by supporting female-founded and female-led startups by providing them with the space, educational resources and global community they need to grow their businesses.

The partnership was announced to mark WeWork’s ninth anniversary and is part of its series of additional efforts to support entrepreneurs and creators of all kinds, and will see the co-working company providing one hundred entrepreneurs from Capital Enterprise’s One Tech programme, which supports underrepresented tech founders in London, with a WeWork membership.

The female founders will be given three month hot desk memberships, which include access to WeWork’s space, custom programming, mentors and local investors as well as use WeWork as their base, and tap into its community of over 40,000 members in London.

WeWork will also be providing the space for Capital Enterprise to host their own events, helping to connect more female founders and future founders with investors, media and other influential and helpful advisors.

Leni Zneimer, WeWork’s vice president of community said in a statement: “It makes so much sense to announce this partnership with Capital Enterprise on our ninth birthday. Like WeWork, Capital Enterprise has built a community connecting startups and entrepreneurs and helping drive their success. We’re looking forward to offering their founders access to our global community of over 400,000 members, thoughtfully designed spaces and a varied and engaging events programme to help them grow.

“Fifty-four percent of WeWork London’s female members are founders, sole proprietors, or in management and I’m looking forward to working closely with the Capital Enterprise team to support more female founders across London.”

The partnership will launch on March 4, ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8 and, to celebrate, WeWork and Capital Enterprise are hosting two separate investor events – free for both members and non-members to attend. The first will be WeWork’s Power Hours, from March 4-8, where female leaders from various fields (content, food, literacy) will be hosting private 1:1 sessions to offer advice and share their backgrounds, skills and career choices. The second event will be an investor breakfast on March 7, where One Tech will be hosting an open office hours session where female tech entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to gain advice and support from their network of investors.

Alison Partridge, head of strategy for Capital Enterprise added: “We have an ambitious target to help founders raise a total of 15 million pounds to grow and scale their companies, this partnership will enable those founders to receive tailored support to establish and grow their businesses.

“Currently, in the UK, for every 1 pound of venture capital investment, less than 1 pence goes to all-female led teams. A staggering 93 percent of all funds raised by European VC-backed companies in 2018 went to all-male founding teams.”