American tennis player and multiple grand slam winner, Serena Williams, has announced that her Venture Capital firm, Serena Ventures, has raised a whopping sum of $111 million in an inaugural fund.
Serena Ventures was founded with the aim to invest in founders who “solve everyday problems through unconventional thinking and diverse points of view.”
Before now, Williams had been pushing the Venture with her own personal funds as an Angel investor, but with this new amount of seed and from many people, she can now take Serena Ventures and their investments to the next level.
She told BLACK ENTERPRISE, “As an angel investor, you can only do so much. I knew that I wanted to do a fund, but I worked backwards, by using my own capital and then creating a track record and getting to know everyone.”
Serena Ventures has so far received funding from limited partners including Norwest, CapitalG, Kapor Foundation, and LionTree, amongst others.
She admits, “the ability to write bigger checks and the ability to lead seed rounds really enables us to deliver on our mission and to unlock value for our investors and open doors for founders.”
Williams shares that the investment world isn’t new terrain for her, as she has always been interested in technology and felt the need to get involved in all the new startups that were coming into the limelight.
“This isn’t new for me, This is something I’ve been doing for a really, really, really long time and it’s something that I absolutely love and I’m super passionate about.”
She also talks about spending a good number of hours on her investment projects, ”I love looking at new companies, I love talking to founders, I absolutely love passing on the knowledge that I’ve been able to get and being able to impact other people.”
Serena talks about how shocked she was to realize the level of inequality in the tech/ startup space.
“I was at a conference and Caryn Seidman-Becker, the founder of CLEAR, was on stage and she said less than 2% of all VC money goes to women. I legit thought she misspoke because 98% is a huge number. When I’m serving, I don’t serve at 98%. Like that’s not even possible, that’s nearly perfect.”
She admitted that she couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that almost 100% of the money was going to men. And this is the reason Serena began to build a team of women who were devoted to helping more women come into the limelight.
With the help of Alison Rapaport Stillman, whom she hired to be a general partner, she is achieving this.
“It’s been proven that the more diverse your team, the better you do, and companies are now starting to realize that,” Serena says.
Serena however made it clear that although she is passionate about diversity, her firm is not strictly for women or people of colour.
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Rachael Obadiaru is a writer who specializes in content writing, copywriting, blogging, and fictional storytelling. She is a feminist and an advocate for the inclusion of marginalized groups. She spends her free time creating a nuisance on Twitter while snacking on pringles and snuggling with her cats.
