Hotbed, which provides end-to-end startup support for founders globally, fronted by longtime ecosystem supporters Perdie Alder and Margaret Anne Coyle (Co-Founders of Hotbed and Spice Startups) have announced Overrules, their new growth and fundraising programme for women-led startups.
Overrules is free to join, and open to fundraising women-led startups globally. It will run virtually over 10 weeks from 29th September through to 5th December.
The programme is advancing Hotbed’s mission of creating an even starting line for founders worldwide, and comes off the back of their successful first programme, Hotbed Beta which supported 100 fundraising founders, 82% of whom came from traditionally overlooked or under-represented groups.
The 10 week programme, which is supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS), SeedLegals and Debite, includes content specifically tailored to address areas known to hold women back. Cohort members will have access to a strong community of exceptional founders, tools to track and benchmark their growth, accelerator-style support delivered by investors, AWS domain experts and scaleup founders, and free AWS Activate Credits, SeedLegals credits and a cashback offer from Debite. The programme will culminate in a Demo Day where top performers will pitch live to investors.
M Coyle, Co-Founder of Hotbed said ‘While the overall narrative surrounding women in tech is that it’s getting easier and better all around, when we dive deeper into conversations with women in our cohorts, it’s clear there is an overwhelming sense of routinely feeling overlooked and undervalued.’
Perdie Alder, Co-Founder, Hotbed added ‘We feel now is the right time to launch a programme tailored to women-led startups, given the gender setbacks that became intensified by the pandemic, and the findings that despite the perceived support in the ecosystem, there’s still less than 2% of VC funding going to women founders.’
Financial backing
As well as opening up content and networks to create an inclusive global ecosystem, the Hotbed founders are looking to financially back the founders in their community. Alongside their ongoing programmes and platform, the team behind Hotbed are raising their own fund to financially back their strongest community members, who have all signed warrants allowing Hotbed to invest in them with a discount.
The programme already has 150+ founders registered from across the globe. You can find out more and join at https://www.thehotbed.co/overrules
