The gender lens fund has received more than €9m in investment from M&G Investments reaching its fundraising target of €50m, five years after launch.
Borski Fund, the Amsterdam-based gender lens fund, has reached final close at just under €50m with commitments of more than €9m from M&G Investments.
The fund, which launched in October of 2019 and has made 17 investments to date, has an investment thesis based on a triple diversity lens. The fund is managed by a predominantly female fund management team investing into female-led tech start-ups or into companies offering products and services for women with a positive impact on women.
Simone Brummelhuis, managing partner and fund director at Borski Fund, said that she was very happy to have M&G Investments as an investor but surprised at the lack of interest among large Dutch investors, and in particular Dutch institutional investors. The fund’s previous investments include €5m from the Visa Foundation in early 2023 as well as anchor investments from several Dutch banks.
“It is surprising that in the Netherlands, where we have many pension funds and institutional investors, a British investor is our first large frontrunner investor in two years,” she said. “We are really glad to have M&G Investments on board as they have proved they want to up their game in both climate tech and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) investment and are also interested in making big ticket investments in follow-ons, which is great for us and our investees as they scale in the future. Thanks to them we have been able to extend our investment period for another year.”
Brummelhuis said she hoped that the M&G investment would serve as a catalyst for Dutch investors and pension funds in particular, to invest into DEI and gender lens funds.
Female-led funds
A report by European Women in VC, a community of more than 1000 senior female venture capital investors of which Brummelhuis is a founding member, found that in 2023 only 16% of general partners (GPs) in Europe were women. The report also revealed that these women raised only 9% of total AUM, compared with 91% of AUM raised by male GPs, despite the fact that funds with a higher representation of female managers generate higher returns – management teams mostly composed of women outperformed men-only teams by 9.3 percentage points.
Brummelhuis said that she and her co-founder Laura Rooseboom’s ambition and ability to reach their hard cap of €50m was testament to the fact that first time funds and funds managed by women could achieve their aims, though it took longer to onboard investors than anticipated.
“Like any start-up, you think it will take you a couple of years to scale and it took us five years,” she said. “Women-led VCs have a harder time of raising funds but if you take the time and have the stamina, you will succeed. We hope to set an example to other female GPs and encourage them to do the same.”
Recent investments
Impact Investor previously reported on the fund’s investments into German green chemistry startup DUDE CHEM, which has developed more sustainable chemical processes in the manufacture of pharmaceutical ingredients and chemical compounds in medication, and into Dutch deep tech startup CarbonX, which has developed a patented carbon anode material that can replace synthetic or natural graphite anodes used in the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries.
More recently, Borski Fund has made follow-on investments into Thirona, a specialist in pre-operative and intra-operative CT imaging using artificial intelligence for robotic bronchoscopic and surgical lung interventions, and into The Selection Lab, which has developed technology for use by HR departments to screen candidates for soft skills like communication, teamwork, and problem-solving.
It has also invested in VivArt-X, a Dutch company developing synthetic biomaterials for what it describes as ‘personalised regenerative solutions’ for use in medical procedures. This includes procedures to improve the outcomes of breast reconstructive surgery for women who have undergone breast tissue removal following a breast cancer diagnosis.
“VivArt-X is a spin-off from Eindhoven University of Technology, which is a world leader in biomedical material science. It is co-founded by two women, a professor and a postdoctoral researcher of the university, who have developed a material which improves the outcomes of breast reconstruction surgery,” explains Brummelhuis. “Our investment will be used to accelerate the technology from pre-clinical phase towards clinical trials.”
