The revealing detail was a panel list. Jessica Peltz-Zatulove had been working in venture capital for only a few months when an investor she invited to speak noticed that the proposed panel contained no women. She had met just two other women in the business. He introduced her to a dozen. Among the connections that followed was Sutian Dong. An ordinary professional courtesy had exposed a rather extraordinary problem: women working in the same industry needed help finding one another.
- A private directory helps women investors find peers, recruits and co-investors.
- Slack channels turn those connections into ongoing conversations about work.
- Public research asks who gets the capital to become a fund manager.
The introduction that was missing
In a 2018 interview, Peltz-Zatulove described early happy hours with about fifteen or sixteen women in New York. The gatherings grew into dinners and events; the founders also assembled a global directory. That account dates their organising to 2014. The organisation itself gives 2015 as its founding year. By the interview, its directory listed 850 women across more than 500 funds in fifteen countries.
Consider the appeal. Venture investors routinely need someone who knows a market, understands a technology or might join a financing round. A contact list can save considerable hunting. For women who rarely encountered one another professionally, putting those names together offered something immediately useful. There was work to do together after everyone went home.
An address book with a day job
Global Women in VC now combines a private directory, a Slack community, gatherings and research. Its audience is specific: women employed full-time at qualifying institutions making direct investments into startups. The published requirements cover institutional and corporate funds, impact investors, accelerators, university funds and direct-investing family offices, among other categories. Applications receive rolling review.
The directory helps members locate co-investors, talent and people with useful market knowledge. Slack supplies the conversation around those introductions. Members share jobs, deals, educational resources and events in channels organised around sectors, stages, roles and places. The combination matters: knowing who exists and having somewhere to talk to them solve different parts of the same problem.
Imagine an investor looking at a startup outside her usual geography. She might need an introduction to a local peer, someone to compare notes with, or a prospective participant in the round. These are different requests, but each starts with identifying a relevant person. The directory and discussion channels give that search a place to begin.
Its March 2025 tenth-anniversary announcement reported more than 6,500 women investors at over 3,700 funds, spanning 250-plus cities and 75-plus countries. It also counted more than 130 Slack channels. Those figures describe the network’s reach at that moment. The smaller channels suggest how a global organisation can still make room for a particular question.
women investors
Follow the money one step back
The network’s more pointed contribution arrived in October 2020, with The Untapped Potential of Women-Led Funds. The report examined women partners and the firms they were building. Its subject was a step earlier in the financing chain than the familiar discussion of startup pitches: before a venture investor can back a company, someone must back her fund.
The research found that 73 percent of women-led firms in its dataset had been founded within the previous five years, while 90 percent qualified as emerging managers. Read together, those findings described a young group of firms facing the practical challenge of getting established. A new fund needs commitments before it can become an enduring source of startup capital.
“Women-led funds are founders too”Jessica Peltz-Zatulove · 2020
In an interview accompanying the research, Peltz-Zatulove argued that awareness efforts had not achieved sufficient scale. Supporting the managers controlling capital offered another route. This explains the organisation’s interest in fundraising resources and emerging managers: helping an investor’s career can also affect the companies she has the authority and resources to finance.
The arithmetic was deliberately concrete. The founders described a scenario in which 275 emerging women-led funds each received a $10 million anchor commitment. That would mean $2.75 billion allocated across the group. It was a proposal about what capital providers could do. It should be read as a funding scenario, with each commitment still requiring an actual investment decision.
The tools are ordinary. The work is specific.
The organisation’s website says Airtable powers the directory and credits Morphic with providing its design and build. It also names AWS and Fenwick as supporters. A Spring Celebration listing at New York’s International Center of Photography identifies additional event partners, including Banc of California, WSGR, Sydecar and Escalon. The public offering combines professional community work with ecosystem support.
That leaves Global Women in VC in a recognisable but varied market. All Raise, European Women in VC and unlock VC also serve women in the investment ecosystem. Geography, eligibility and programming give these organisations different uses. Global Women in VC’s distinctive combination is a cross-border institutional-investor directory connected to daily peer discussion and a body of public research.
A useful network has limits
For an eligible investor, the practical starting point is the application. Once admitted, she can look for people relevant to her work and participate in the appropriate conversations. For someone building a professional community elsewhere, the copyable idea is equally practical: organise around a recurring task, then give people a way to find the person who can help.
The research also needs the right frame. A self-reported professional directory describes the people it captures; it is not automatically a census of an entire industry. The website acknowledges a possible New York bias in its dataset. Keeping that distinction in view makes the findings more useful, especially when comparing different years or different organisations’ measures of representation.
The conditions matter. A founder seeking an open pitch marketplace will encounter a community built for investment professionals. An aspiring investor without qualifying employment may fall outside its membership rules. And introductions leave investment decisions in the hands of individual funds. A directory can improve the chances of finding a useful person; it cannot make that person write a cheque. The achievement here begins earlier, with making the introduction possible.