Press Release

Female founders and women in venture capital found inspiration from a powerhouse of world class industry speakers at a ground-breaking female entrepreneurship event hosted by leading law firm Shoosmiths.

The spHERe Summit 2023 – ‘leading successful change’, was held in partnership with London & Partners, and hosted at Shoosmiths’ London base in Bow Churchyard.

The insight-packed event featured a host of uplifting speakers including Grace Beverley, founder and CEO of fitness brands Tala and Shreddy, and Gravita CEO Caroline Plumb OBE, who joined other successful female influencers from the worlds of academia, the private sector, public sector and retail banking in a day aimed at providing inspiring dialogue to action real change and break down barriers in the venture capital (VC) space.

The audience was enlightened by founders sharing their often very difficult journeys to success, as to what changes need to be brought about to ensure equal opportunities for all, regardless of social identity, and where they might seek help. It also placed responsibility squarely at the door of many investor institutions that still need to address their own internal processes and unconscious bias in order to unblock the huge potential of so many promising entrepreneurs.

Shoosmiths’ spHERe network was launched three years ago by corporate partner Helen Burnell and aims to support female founders and venture capitalists. The goal of spHERe is to help women find success through creating a forum for meaningful networking opportunities which address the disparities that exist between female and male entrepreneurs scaling and funding businesses.

Caroline Plumb launched the day with a stirring keynote speech about how she first launched into business by hand-building her first computer, before going on to taking Gravita on a rapid scale-up journey into a £100m business.

Grace Beverley, who is named in Forbes 30 under 30s retail, talked about her journey from discovering a gap in the market for sustainable active wear and conquering the world of social media, before launching two global businesses and writing a Sunday Times bestselling book – all before she turned 25.

She urged founders to make sure investors saw their ‘power’ and advised them to connect with others on the same journey. 

She said: “The most valuable mentor you can have is someone who is one step in front of you. By being generous and sharing your insight, ultimately you will get out what you put in.”

The Journeys to Scale founder panel featured Globechains’ May Al-Karooni, Ayesha Ofori of PropElle and Katy Wigdahl of Speechmatics, who were accompanied by moderator and Shoosmiths’ partner Alastair Peet. The three CEOs discussed their personal journeys to success, and identified that although mentoring is welcome, it must be ‘targeted’, and more tangible actions need to be taken to tackle unconscious bias.

Jill Pay of The Gender Index (TGI) and NatWest’s Yvonne Greeves highlighted disparities in the funding arena with an in-depth look at the work of TGI and how gaps in funding could be addressed. Jill Pay revealed that in this year’s TGI report, only 17.3 percent of 5 million active UK companies were female led. NatWest has also been instrumental in supporting The Rose Review.

Yvonne Greeves detailed that a total of 134 institutions with an investing power of nearly £1 trillion have now signed up to the Investing in Women Code – a commitment by financial services firms to improving female entrepreneurs’ access to tools, resources and finance.

SVC2UK ‘s ‘Actioning change’ saw William McQuillan of Frontline Ventures, Mikela Druckman of GreyParrot and Emma Davies of long-standing Shoosmiths’ client Octopus Ventures join Janet Coyle of London & Partners. With £2 billion under management and investing over £200 million a year, Octopus Ventures is one of the largest and most active venture investors in Europe. 

The panel highlighted that there were 10 percent fewer deals in 2022 than 2021 due to a ‘volatile marketplace’ along with a ‘record amount of dry capital’ and stressed the importance of using the ‘power of data’ as an ‘essential tool’ in breaking down gender disparities. The group discussed how by analysing continual live data which backs up the comfortable statistics, we could unlock the potential of the many female founders who could be adding £250bn to the UK economy.

Shoosmiths’ Helen Burnell said: “I first launched spHERe in a bid to ‘join the dots’ and for us to play our part in building vital networks for female venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. The aim was to use unique networking opportunities to help address wider disparity across the UK to help close the complex barriers including an irrefutable gender funding gap.”

“We were honoured to welcome some of the most inspirational women in the VC space to help us host our spHERe summit, raise awareness of the inequality in funding, fuel debate and help create real tangible change for the future. We were particularly proud to present our headline speaker Grace Beverley, who has become a formidable advocate for angel investing – helping to demystify the process amongst her peers.”

Helen added: “We hope that the meaningful networking opportunities for female founders and investors we can create through spHERe can help to drive real change in the UK investment landscape through allowing more women to access better networking, growth and finance on the  journey that is building a business. There needs to be fundamental changes to the amount of venture capital funds that women led businesses receive from the current 1 to 2 percent, but also an increase to the number of female venture capital partners and female representation on investment committees that we see.”

Shoosmiths is also a proud sponsor of the Gender Index report, where it aims to play its part in building a more detailed picture of where there are gender gaps and improve the quality of data and analysis available, to foster greater gender equality in the access to funding for female founded business throughout their life cycle.