National Women’s Enterprise Week and the Radia Accelerator programme

Albion are very exciting to be celebrating the first ever National Women’s Enterprise Week. The brainchild of serial entrepreneur Alison Cork MBE, it is designed to promote and celebrate women’s enterprise as we are all too familiar with the under-representation of females in startups. 

For International Women’s Day 2023, we did some internal auditing and highlighted that 26% of Albion’s portfolio companies have female founders/ CEOs. Whilst above the venture capital industry average of 22% (from the BVCA and Level 20’s Diversity and Inclusion Study 2021), we always want to do better and, as a believer that venture capital firms can help shape gender diversity from an early stage, we hatched a plan to challenge the status quo.

In partnership with fellow venture capital firm SpeedInvest, we recently launched Radia Accelerator, a programme aimed at women looking to start software companies in climate, fintech, healthtech and education.

Delivered online and in-person, the eight week programme provides access to capital, networks and know-how content, enabling participants learn how to start, build, and scale a B2B software company from scratch.

In celebration of NWEW, we wanted to share the progress of the Radia programme and are happy to report that it is in full swing following a recruitment campaign back in May. The programme received 58 applications from a diverse group of women: 50% white, 38% Asian, 8% black and 4% mixed. 25 were invited to take part. Most women come from C-level and head of roles at startups, scaleups and corporates such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Vodaphone and the NHS. 

The programme has garnered great interest and participation from leading operators and investors from major venture capital funds across Europe. We are so thrilled to see the venture capital industry uniting to tackle an important issue and nurture a more diverse ecosystem. 

We follow the 2023 cohort’s journeys with real excitement and hope that by sowing a small seed through this initiative we can help change the diversity problem in enterprise.

To learn more about our Radia Accelerator programme, visit: https://www.radiaccelerator.com/.