Shebah, an Australian women-only ride-sharing startup has successfully smashed its target of raising $3 million over its month-long campaign. With this event, it has broken the record for the most amount raised under Australia’s new equity-crowdfunding regime. Women in action. Slaying, right?

McEncroe says, “Just stoked, delighted beyond words. I’m so relieved and amazed, and I feel really supported, and also a bit daunted. I’ve got pressure now from investors, and I’m aware of their commitments and expectations, and I take that responsibility very seriously.”

She further adds, “I’ve bootstrapped for so long, so to have a force and endorsement from so many people is not just a shot in the arm in terms of capital, its confidence that what we’re doing is valuable. I don’t want to disappoint anyone, so we’ll be working bloody hard to make sure we deliver.”

Highlights of the crowdfunding campaign

– The campaign: Shebah is putting the ‘share’ in rideshare, was backed by 2,100 awesome investors, with 94% of them being women.

– Shebah’s campaign broke the record of local neobank up-and-comer Xinja which raised  $2.6 million.

Matt Vitale, co-founder of Birchal that facilitates equity crowdfunding in Australia said, “We’re so thrilled that Shebah now holds this record. Shebah’s founder George McEncroe and her team are brilliant ambassadors, and a perfect case study for what is possible under the equity-crowdfunding regime in Australia now.”

McEncroe did it and so can you.

McEncroe says, “I was hoping we’d hit the $3 million mark, but I didn’t dare say it out loud. I have so much thanks for everyone who believed in our vision.”

Sources:

Women-only ride-sharing startup Shebah bags $3 million in biggest-ever equity-crowdfunding raise

Main Image: ©Shebah/This Women Can

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When a woman gets promoted up the ladder in any corporate, people often start looking at her with sceptical looks. Remarks like “What did she do to get him to get promoted to that position? Did she deserve it?” seem floating around office lobbies. Her being smart, ambitious and hardworking traits are put aside which clearly is not the case for men. Well, no study has yet inked that women are any less than men when it comes to running a business, yet still, not only such presumptions exist, they are thriving in our society. Do you ask, why? Because we feed them.

Today, where women empowerment is a highly sensitive and talked about topic, crowdfunding seems like one exception where women have innate and better hold over men. As per a 2016 research conducted by Ethan Mollick of Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Jason Greenberg of NYU, shows that even though less than 8% of all VC backed companies have women co-founders, still women are 13% more likely to succeed in raising money on Kickstarter than men. They concluded that it is the support of other women, backers desire to help a community and their acknowledgement of female project creators operating in a male-dominated space are some of the factors that favour women in crowdfunding space.

As per yet another study conducted by crowdfunding platform Pledge Me Six, came out some intriguing facts addressing to the rising women success ratio in crowdfunding space as compared to man. Anna Guenther, founder of Pledge Me Six said, “half of the entrepreneurs who were seeking funding through her platform had female founders.”

Adding more credibility to such studies, Donna M. De Carolis, dean of the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University says, “Women tend to be better conversationalists than men so they are able to better connect with the audience.”

To strengthen the facts stated above, let’s take the clock back to 2016 when Andreea Gorbatai, an assistant professor with Haas’s Management of Organizations Group, and Laura Nelson of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, published a paper, titled, “The Narrative Advantage: Gender and the Language of Crowdfunding.” The paper was concluded with an understanding that women are better at telling a story that resonates with potential investors when it comes to crowdfunding.

Andreea and Laura noted, “Online fundraising settings pose an interesting empirical puzzle: women are systematically more successful than men, an outcome contrary to offline gender inequality.  We propose that this outcome is partially explained by linguistic differences between men and women in terms of the language they use, and … results support our theory, suggesting a link between micro-level linguistic choices and macro level outcomes: the institution of crowdfunding may reduce gender inequalities in the fundraising arena by benefitting the communication style of women.”

Now, even though crowdfunding platforms, digital marketing and social media have levelled up the playing field for women and men alike, it is still not all roses. Women centric crowdfunding platforms like iFundWomen, Desired Wings, Woomentum and more are making and witnessing this rise. The National Women’s Business Council report noted that, on Kickstarter, the average funding target for women was $14,552 per campaign whereas men outraced women with an average funding target of $20,282, which is a clear indication of risk aversion by women entrepreneurs. They need to believe in themselves and we all need to support them. That’s only human.

Main Image: ©Walt Disney Pictures

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