GENDEX: Year-end insights & what’s next?✨
Hi friends,
It’s our final newsletter of the year — a short one to wrap things up before the holidays.
I arrived in Guernsey last night, where I’ll be celebrating the festive season with family. But before signing off, I wanted to share a couple of highlights from this month:
✨ Our Venture Leadership Circle — where investors came together to help us shape our new tool GENDEX Pulse, set to launch in 2025.
✨ Our Board of Experts meeting — where we refined the GENDEX Index and mapped out what’s next.
A big thank you to everyone who’s shared their time, ideas, and support for GENDEX this year. We couldn’t do it without you. 💚
We’ll be back in 2025 to co-develop GENDEX Pulse with our partners — and we’d love for you to be part of it. (More on that below.)
— Sophie Webber, Communications Lead at Founderland for GENDEX
Venture Leadership Circle recap
Earlier this month, we hosted our first Venture Leadership Circle, bringing together leading investors to shape GENDEX Pulse and its role in the investment landscape.
The goal? To co-create a tool that allows VCs to benchmark the diversity of their portfolios and track improvements over time.
We focused on two key questions:
🔍 What data are VCs tracking, and how accessible is it?
⚙️ How can GENDEX Pulse deliver real value to funds and stakeholders?
Here’s what we learned:
📊 Data gaps persist. Metrics like women-led companies are tracked, but insights on IP ownership and vesting schedules are harder to access.
🚀 GENDEX Pulse can drive change. Investors see it as a game-changer for LP reporting, fundraising, and building more diverse founder pipelines.
This session confirmed the need for a unified approach to diversity benchmarking—and we’re building it with our partners in 2025.
Want to co-create GENDEX Pulse with us? Reach out to join as a co-development partner!
Board of Experts recap
Last week, we gathered our Board of Experts — a stellar group of researchers, investors, and industry leaders — to refine GENDEX Pulse. Their feedback is shaping our metrics, sharpening definitions, and ensuring the tool delivers meaningful insights on diversity in VC.
Here’s what we’re focusing on next, thanks to their feedback:
🔍 Refining key metrics — We’re contextualising important data points, like “women-led companies in portfolios,” and rethinking how we measure "Women in Deep Tech" by adding stage/time breakdowns for companies.
🧪 Digging deeper into equity and vesting — Women founders face more restrictive vesting schedules, often driven by limited experience, poor legal support, or nervousness around securing any funding at all. We’re investigating this further.
📊 IP Ownership — Women are less likely to bring "previous IPs" into new companies, a finding that highlights the need for better support systems.
💡 Action points — We’ll be ensuring definitions are clearer, data is contextualised, and our Pulse tool reflects the real stories behind the stats.
We look forward to actioning the board’s feedback in the new year. 🔥
Want early access to GENDEX pulse?
GENDEX Pulse is launching in 2025, and we’re looking for co-development partners to help us shape it.
Here’s what it means to be a co-development partner:
🚀 Early access — Get a first look at the tool and exclusive access to test it.
🛠️ Hands-on influence — Share feedback and help us tailor the tool to investor needs.
🤝 Be a trailblazer — Be at the forefront of shaping a new era of diversity benchmarking in venture capital.
If you’re an investor (especially in deep tech) and want to get involved, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out here.