Feminine Make investments acquires sustainability-focused funding platform Gaia Investments

When Feminine Make investments launched in 2019, it did so with the objective of making a group the place ladies who wished to spend money on the inventory market, however weren’t positive the place to begin, might acquire the data and confidence to make the leap. Now, its customers can be in a position to take action all inside the Feminine Make investments platform.

The Copenhagen-based startup introduced the acquisition of fellow Danish fintech Gaia Investments this week with plans to combine the buying and selling platform, which focuses on investing in firms with sustainability objectives, into its app. The acquisition value of Gaia was undisclosed, however the startup raised at a $3 million valuation, three months previous to the transaction, Feminine Make investments informed TechCrunch.

For Feminine Make investments co-founder and companion Camilla Falkenberg, including the power to take a position immediately via Feminine Make investments is a superb subsequent step for the subscription edtech platform.

“Since day one, we’ve at all times been very centered on constructing the options and merchandise that had been requested by our group,” Falkenberg stated. “And we get requests day by day for the likelihood to commerce immediately via us.”

She added that she thinks the platform will get that request so actually because its customers belief it. A latest survey of shoppers discovered that 96% of them would belief Feminine Make investments with their cash greater than their financial institution.

Feminine Make investments has spent the final yr increase the corporate in a option to extra simply combine buying and selling, too. Falkenberg stated since they raised their $4.5 million seed spherical final November, they’ve constructed out an app, expanded their tech workforce and raised a further $3 million in funding.

However once they got here throughout Gaia Investments in July, they realized it would make extra sense, and save time, for Feminine Make investments to companion with an current buying and selling platform versus constructing their very own.

“Gaia has a robust model right here within the Nordics and such a robust deal with ethics and sustainable investing, one thing we’re additionally very taken with,” she stated. “Because the talks progressed, it grew to become an increasing number of clear it was an excellent transfer for us.”

The workforce at Gaia felt the identical means, Mads Sverre Willumsen, a co-founder and CTO informed TechCrunch.

“We knew Feminine Make investments and noticed the journey that they had been on up to now three years,” he stated. “After we talked and noticed we had alignment, the choice was not that tough.”

The 2 firms additionally shared comparable founding tales — each appeared to create an investing product that they felt was wanted and didn’t exist.

For Feminine Make investments, it was in 2019 when the founders realized there wasn’t a superb useful resource that taught ladies find out how to begin investing. For Gaia, it was when co-founder and CEO David Bentzon-Ehlers’s mom requested him in 2020 if there was a protected place to spend money on sustainable firms, and his realization that the platform she was on the lookout for didn’t but exist.

Whereas it isn’t tremendous widespread for startups to get acquired so early in life — Gaia had simply accomplished a TechStars accelerator program just a few months earlier — Sverre Willumsen stated the transaction made sense for Gaia as a result of they had been extra taken with increasing the attain of their product than being startup founders.

“I didn’t develop into a founder within the first place to be a founder,” he stated. “I did it as a result of it was a chance to make quite a lot of innovation and a distinction for folks fairly rapidly.”

The present Gaia customers can be offloaded — with their cash returned in full — within the close to future because the platform begins to combine into Feminine Make investments. Falkenberg stated from there they don’t have a selected launch date but for Feminine Make investments customers, however that the power to commerce will launch first within the European Union and within the U.Ok. after that.

Consolidation of early-stage startups has been a rising pattern this yr, and because the fintech sector has struggled in 2022’s uncertainty, it appears smart that a few of these smaller firms will mix to keep away from getting left behind. I’m positive we’ll begin to see extra of this heading into subsequent yr.

For Feminine Make investments although, the long-term plan, no matter market situations, is all falling into place.

“Our imaginative and prescient is to create a particularly user-friendly, and straightforward to navigate, platform with a deal with sustainability to spend money on the values that matter to them,” Falkenberg stated. “We’ve a really loyal consumer base who’s simply ready for us to launch the subsequent product which is a superb place to begin.”