Giant Leap's FY24 Equity Clear data

Last year, we launched Equity Clear in partnership with Scale Investors and the Alberts. The initiative was launched to galvanise the growing calls within the VC sector for further investment in women-led startups. The thesis behind launching the initiative was that you can’t manage what you don’t measure so, step 1 is transparency.

The startups of today are the big corporations of tomorrow and the simple lesson from decades of limited progress is that it’s not easy to change the cultures of large corporations to make them more diverse and inclusive, so we have to think about diversity from Day 1. We have to start with startups.

As founding members of Equity Clear, we remain committed to releasing our data each year. So let’s get straight to it.

Giant Leap internal team diversity summary

 We're proud that our investment team is currently 67% women (including 1 partner). 

* Any gender or identity can refer to a woman, a man, a non-binary person, a trans or gender diverse person or any other gender identity. Overlaps with women or men, as indicated by the target range. 

** This target has been set in line with population levels.

Investment pipeline

We’ve seen improvements in the diversity data of the pitch decks we received this year compared to the prior financial year (25% in FY23, 33% in FY24) and are delighted to have exceeded our target of 30% of pitch decks received by women-led startups. 

Due to the challenging early stage investment environment during the financial year, our new investments were limited to one startup with an all-male founding team. However, in line with our DEI policy, the founding team committed to developing an actionable plan to achieve 25% women representation as a priority in our legal documentation which ensures that the founders have an ongoing commitment to diversity as they scale. 

We believe in merit-based funding and expect there to be changes in the diversity of our portfolio overtime with the aim to maintain or exceed our target of 60% of our portfolio companies being women-led startups.

As part of the Beyond the Billions program, we have also pledged to invest an average of AU$3 million into women-led startups each year of our investment period so we are aiming to make up this target over the coming years. 

* 'Companies investigated' refers to companies investigated by our Investment Committee. ‘Investments made’ refers to the number of new investments made in FY24 (i.e. by number of companies)

* ‘Women-led’ teams are defined as founding teams with at least one woman founder. We also define women to include all women, regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth, and acknowledge that gender is a spectrum. We intend to expand our reporting to also include non-binary founders in future. 

Portfolio diversity

Our data shows a slight decrease in our diversity statistics across our portfolio with 58% led by women.

*Giant Leap defines women-led to mean that at least one member of the founding team identifies as a woman. We define women to include all women, regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth, and acknowledge that gender is a spectrum. 

**Giant Leap defines ethnically diverse business to mean that at least one member of the founding team identifies as racially or ethnically diverse.

Conclusion

We release our FY24 data against a disappointing backdrop where:

• Women-led startups still receive only 2-4% of total venture capital funding and while there is broad consensus among investors that the numbers are not good enough, there continues to be disagreement on what to do about them (read here).
• For the first six months of this year, all-male founding teams represented 88% of the $2.3 billion invested into Australian start-ups.
• The federal government’s only program for women-led startups will end prematurely as it is said to have had no “measurable impact” on the wider startup ecosystem.
  

Despite the growing awareness and discussions around this issue, significant progress remains elusive. Missing Perspective’s deep dive into the challenges faced by women founders and investors provides some perspectives, including an interview with Giant Leap partner Rachel Yang.

By sharing our performance against the targets we set, we aim to foster greater accountability and encourage industry-wide change.

We recognise that there is always room for improvement and welcome any feedback or ideas. For startups or funds looking to implement similar policies, we’ve made our DEI policy publicly available. Check it out in Notion here.