Jodie Imam opens up about Tractor Ventures’ commitment to bridging the gender funding gap

Jodie Imam is the co-founder and co-CEO of Tractor Ventures. Here, she explains why improving the gender funding gap is a priority for Tractor in funding many more women in the tech ecosystem.

We began Tractor Ventures because we believed we would fund many more companies that weren’t necessarily VC-shaped but were most definitely revenue-generating. These sustainable technology companies could scale when extra capital was injected into their business.

We also could fund a more diverse range of founders with our offering. We committed to seeing that transpire into funding many more women founders than was ordinarily occurring.

We’re intent on a portfolio of investments to be an even gender split of 50% as part of this focus on funding more women in the tech ecosystem.

There have been, and continue to be, challenges in achieving this goal.

We can sit and talk about this all day long, but instead, we prefer to take continuous steps forward to see this gap closed in our particular funding statistics.

Plus, of course, we support the Equity Clear initiative (spearheaded by Scale Investors, Alberts Impact Ventures and Giant Leap Impact VC) to provide transparent funding statistics by gender and a commitment towards continual improvement towards imbalances in those statistics.

The recent State of Australian Startup Funding Report released by Cut Through Ventures and Folklore Ventures gave us a great snapshot of where we are positioned today as a startup funding ecosystem when it comes to gender diversity in funding:

“Although 2023 saw an increase in the proportion of total funding received by female founders and their participation in deals, the growth in funding is largely attributable to a few large-scale deals. Meanwhile, the rise in deal participation is predominantly due to a surge in smaller Pre-Seed and Seed funding rounds.”

This emphasis on looking at the more granular micro-aspects for contextual relevance on progression in gender diversity statistics provides meaningful insight that there is still much work to be done.

“In 2023, the proportion of investor capital allocated to mixed-gender founding teams recovered from its lowest point in recent years, reaching 18%. The share for all-women founding teams also rose, moving from 2% to 4%. However, due to the significant decrease in overall funding within the ecosystem in 2023, the total dollar amount received by women founders was substantially lower than that of 2021.”

There continues to be significant positive sentiment to address this gender diversity gap. But it continues to be talk for the most part, and we hope and believe these figures will trend positively in the following report released in 2025, as a concerted effort is made by a more significant number of investment funds across the board.

As a woman-founded funding company ourselves, Aprill Enright and I (along with our co-founder and my co-CEO Matt Allen) are intent on contributing to this challenge.

L-R: Tractor Ventures Co-Founders Matt Allen, Jodie Imam & Aprill Enright. Source: Supplied

We are passionate about doing as much as possible to solve it.

We are committed to doing so, as it is in our DNA to continue to walk that walk.

We have partnered with the Equity Clear initiative and acknowledge the groundwork that Samar McHeileh, managing partner at Scale Investors, and Lisa Federonko, investment manager at Alberts Impact Fund, have put in to move momentum faster.

Together with a large group of supporting VCs and Family Offices, our first actions in a movement towards more transparency will be profiling our gender statistics* for our funding.

This will be followed by further initiatives ensuring our non-dilutive funding can reach many more women founders to see them scale and grow faster with the capital to do so.

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*In a continuing audit process, with numbers to be regularly updated.

These numbers will be updated monthly, and we will continue to report on the overall statistics of the entire pipeline of companies seeking funding that apply for our financing as well.

Tractor Ventures co-founder & co-CEO Jodie Imam at the Tractor 2023 Strategy Offsite. Source: supplied.

‍Lastly, we would encourage all women founders looking for funding to contact Tractor Ventures as part of your research and investigation, as we have designed a founder-friendly funding options that is fast, flexible, and easily sits alongside VC funding, and has the added benefit of having a known cost of capital.

As more women founders understand our type of funding and how to leverage it for increased valuations and reduced levels of dilution, we imagine we will continue to see those funding statistics correct towards our company goal of gender funding parity.

Jodie Imam is co-founder and co-CEO of Tractor Ventures. She is a non-executive director of Private Media, which owns SmartCompany. 

This article was first published on the Tractor Ventures website.