Beyond The Billion Turkey Launches Powered by Arya Women: $100 Million Target for Venture-Backable Women Entrepreneurs in Turkey and Neighboring Countries

Istanbul-based social venture, Arya Women Investment Platform, launches a pledge campaign in collaboration with Beyond the Billion

Istanbul, Turkey (October 12, 2021) —The social venture, Arya Women Investment Platform , announced a pledge campaign in collaboration with Beyond the Billion (from the founders of The Billion Dollar Fund for Women). The “100 Million Dollar Target for Venture-Backable Women Entrepreneurs in Turkey and Neighboring Countries”. This initiative is part of the company’s long-term strategy to create sustainable and inclusive economies that will empower women economically. To date, Arya WIP has facilitated more than $3 million in investments through its investment committee and strategic partnerships. The pledge campaign was created to mobilize other investors to advance gender investing on a national and regional scale by 2023. 

Despite clear outperformance, women innovators lack access to capital. Shelly Porges and Sarah Chen, the Founders and Managing Partners of Beyond the Billion, rallied the venture community to pledge over $1 Billion towards women founders – and met this goal in under nine months! They are now going BEYOND THE BILLION – focused on driving capital into and with funds investing into women for returns through diversity. Arya Women Invest Platform, leveraging their experience, launches the pledge campaign to catalyze capital for women-founded companies in Turkey and the region. 

“We aim to mobilize a regional consortium with Beyond The Billion committed to investing $100 Million by 2023 in women founders, rapidly increasing the funding pipeline,” said Ahu Serter, founder of Arya WIP. “It is important that more women get access to funding. There are many ways of achieving this goal. Arya Women Investment Platform is partnering with Beyond the Billion initiative to help to raise awareness among VCs towards gender bias. Only 2.2% of venture capital goes to female founders and in our region it is less than that. Arya is also working to make sure that there are more female investors as decision makers. So, we have gender equality on both sides of the table.  Arya Women Investment Platform was created with a vision to transform the world through female leadership. Now, through the global partnerships and power of our 300 members, we plan to extend our scope to have a bigger impact in both our country and our neighboring countries.” 

“We at Beyond the Billion are delighted to be partnering with Ahu Serter and her team at ARYA Women Investment Platform to provide the access to funding that women-founded venture-backable businesses in this region need to scale.  We see extraordinary women innovating in sectors ranging from agritech, cleantech, edtech, healthtech and so much more, solving some of our greatest problems and this initiative by ARYA WIP will advance their work and improve our world.”

Arya Women Investment Platform invites VCs and Investors into such funds to join the campaign. Follow the campaign updates on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter/@aryawomen. 

#aryawomen #investinwomen #diversitydrivereturns

About Arya Women Investment Platform

The Arya Women Investment Platform is a social venture that creates acceleration and investment opportunities with strategic partnerships for women-led entrepreneurship. We bridge the gap between talent, acceleration / essential funding, and investors (funds and private individuals) by providing an integrated instrument to match female entrepreneurs with our strategic partners from the startup ecosystem. Arya WIP invested in 16 female-founded startups with more than 3 million USD as of today. Arya WIP is a membership-based platform that helps to create more opportunities for women entrepreneurs. We connect experienced women founders with vetted investors, managing the due diligence process to decrease risks and save time on both sides. We build up an active members community that provides exclusive access to events, expert discussions, and networking opportunities.

About Beyond the Billion

The Billion Dollar Fund for Women (TBDF) was launched at the World Bank meetings in Bali in October 2018: with an audacious goal of catalyzing $1 billion dollars into the hands of female founders; addressing the gender venture investment gap where women were receiving only 2.2% of all venture capital funding. In less than a year, TBDF mobilized a global consortium of over 80 venture funds committed to investing $1 billion dollars in women-founded companies. Following this, the founders, Shelly Porges and Sarah Chen launched Beyond The Billion (BTB), to catalyze capital deployed to and with these venture funds, ensuring their continued capacity to invest- by mobilizing LP commitments, convening LPs and connecting them to GPs who invest in venture-backable companies founded by diverse women founders.

For more information, please contact our corporate communications team at [email protected] 

For more information about Arya Women Investment Platform, please visit www.aryawomen.com 

For more information about Beyond the Billion, please visit www.beyondthebillion.com

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