There may be no clear data on the number of venture capital (VC) and angel investment that has gone to SA tech start-ups with women founders, but Ventureburn has identified Smartblade as one of eight start-ups with female founders who have recently clinched funding.
No one seems to know what percentage of such deals went to SA tech start-ups founded by women.
But data on disclosed SA tech start-up (software technology companies no older than seven years) deals that Ventureburn has reported on since 1 January 2018 reveals that it may be as little as R77.7-million — or 4.5% of all such disclosed deals (see this story).
The R77.7-million includes SweepSouth’s R30-million investment from Naspers Foundry earlier this year, R20-million raised by insurtech Naked earlier this year, Smartblade’s R9.5-million raise, R3.4-million raised by Voyc.ai, R12-million raised by DigsConnect, Zomila’s (former Zelda Learning) two investments of R500 000 each and Jumpin Rides’ R1.8-million in investment.
In June SA hardware tech incubator Savant announced that it had invested R9.5-million in Cape Town based medtech startup SmartBlade.
The start-up was founded in 2016 by husband and wife duo Nick Nevin (who serves as managing director) and specialist anaesthesiologist Dr Caroline Corbett (pictured above).
The funding will allow the pre-revenue start-up to acquire moulds to manufacture its device and to attain certification, which he said includes US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) registration.
In 2017 Dr Corbett won the WFSA-Fresenius Innovation Award, along with $25 000, for developing SmartBlade’s device (see this story).
Outside of the VC investment, SmartBlade has raised around R2-million in funding, which includes self-funding, prize money, angel investment, government seed funding through the Technology Innovation Agency and Seda.
This is an adaptation of an article entitled, “Eight SA tech startups with women founders that have recently had VC, angel deals [Updated]” on the Ventureburn website
