Feminine Make investments acquires sustainability-focused funding platform Gaia Investments

When Feminine Make investments launched in 2019, it did so with the aim of making a neighborhood the place girls who wished to spend money on the inventory market, however weren’t positive the place to start out, might achieve the data and confidence to make the leap. Now, its customers can be in a position to take action all throughout 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 targets, 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 advised TechCrunch.

For Feminine Make investments co-founder and accomplice Camilla Falkenberg, including the power to speculate straight by way of Feminine Make investments is a superb subsequent step for the subscription edtech platform.

“Since day one, we have now all the time been very centered on constructing the options and merchandise that had been requested by our neighborhood,” Falkenberg mentioned. “And we get requests daily for the likelihood to commerce straight by way of us.”

She added that she thinks the platform will get that request so actually because its customers belief it. A current 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 solution to extra simply combine buying and selling, too. Falkenberg mentioned since they raised their $4.5 million seed spherical final November, they’ve constructed out an app, expanded their tech group and raised an extra $3 million in funding.

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

“Gaia has a powerful model right here within the Nordics and such a powerful give attention to ethics and sustainable investing, one thing we’re additionally very thinking about,” she mentioned. “Because the talks progressed, it grew to become increasingly more clear it was a terrific transfer for us.”

The group at Gaia felt the identical method, Mads Sverre Willumsen, a co-founder and CTO advised TechCrunch.

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

The 2 firms additionally shared comparable founding tales — each seemed 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 an excellent useful resource that taught girls tips on 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 in search of 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 mentioned the transaction made sense for Gaia as a result of they had been extra thinking about increasing the attain of their product than being startup founders.

“I didn’t grow to be a founder within the first place to be a founder,” he mentioned. “I did it as a result of it was a chance to make loads of innovation and a distinction for individuals fairly shortly.”

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 mentioned from there they don’t have a particular 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.Okay. 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 circumstances, is all falling into place.

“Our imaginative and prescient is to create an especially user-friendly, and simple to navigate, platform with a give attention to sustainability to spend money on the values that matter to them,” Falkenberg mentioned. “We have now a really loyal consumer base who’s simply ready for us to launch the following product which is a superb place to begin.”