Why women-led VC funds lead with speed and small checks. Venture capital has spent the last decade selling founders on scale as bigger funds, bigger rounds, bigger valuations. It delivered on longer and longer timelines as committees convene, partners weigh in, and diligence stretches into months. A growing group of women-led investment funds is doing the exact opposite. They write smaller checks, usually a few hundred thousand dollars and make their decisions in days instead of months. They believe this fast approach actually creates better and more successful companies, not just more diverse ones. Sarah Kunst, the founder and Managing Director of Cleo Capital, started her firm based on this exact idea. Cleo usually invests between $100,000 and $1 million in very new startups. They step in before a company has the big sales numbers that traditional, larger funds need to feel safe. Kunst describes herself as an investor who trusts her gut. She will often promise to back a founder before the company's final product is even fully decided. A partner who needs three committee meetings to say yes can't pre-commit to a person, she can only underwrite a deck. The smaller check is what makes the faster call possible, and the faster call is what lets Cleo be first in, ahead of the pattern-matching that dominates later rounds. The approach has put the firm behind companies like Ellevest, Hill House Home, FalconX and Kobold Metals, bets made when those companies looked far less obvious than they do now. Table of Contents Conviction before consensus. Anu Duggal, founding partner of Female Founders Fund, arrived at a version of the same discipline from a different angle. FFF started as a $6 million fund in 2014 and has since scaled its check sizes as it raised larger funds, but the underlying logic hasn't changed. Back six to eight companies a year, know them deeply, and move on instinct about the founder rather than waiting for a market to validate the category first. Tala founder Shivani Siroya has credited Duggal's early conviction with pushing her to be bolder about the company's direction, describing how most investors pattern-match, while Duggal saw the founder's own conviction and backed it instead. That's the practical output of a smaller, faster check, or it's a bet on a person before the market has agreed there's anything to bet on. FFF's portfolio, Maven Clinic, now valued at $1.7 billion, and Tala, with annualised revenue around $300 million as of early 2025, suggest the approach isn't just faster; it's found real outliers. A lane, not yet A takeover. The scale of this shift is still modest against the industry as a whole. Paige Hendrix Buckner, CEO of All Raise, has tracked more than 280 women-led funds in the U.S. that have raised over $12.6 billion since the start of 2022. Real money, but a fraction of the $76.8 billion raised by U.S. VC firms in 2024 alone. Smaller, faster funds are not displacing the traditional model; rather, they're carving out a distinct lane inside it, one built for the stage where speed and access matter more than firepower. What changes after the check clears? The lane has attracted disproportionate attention because the data suggests who writes the check changes what happens after it clears. A University of Michigan study of Crunchbase financing data found that women-led startups financed by all-male VC partnerships exited at rates 25% - 30% lower than comparable companies. But the gap disappeared entirely among firms with at least one woman partner, even though both types of firms invested in women-led companies at similar rates. In other words, the disparity wasn't about who got funded. It was about what happened to them once they were funded. The gap the model hasn't closed. That's the more uncomfortable half of this story, and the women-led funds themselves are the first to name it. The same speed and intimacy that make a $250K check land fast at pre-seed offer little protection two years later, when a founder needs a $10 million Series A and has to walk into rooms her early backers can't always get her into. Getting to seed has become the easier battle, but getting from seed to Series B remains the harder one. Largely because follow-on rounds are sourced through existing investor relationships where women remain structurally underrepresented, the very networks that smaller, founder-first funds were built to route around in the first place. So the smaller check isn't really an alternative to the traditional VC model, as it's a correction aimed at one specific failure point, the earliest and most subjective one, where speed of trust matters more than size of capital. What it hasn't yet solved is the failure point one round later, where trust has to convert into access. FAQs: * Q1. What are women-led venture funds? These are investment firms run by women. They back new startups with small checks and make decisions in just days. * Q2. Why do these funds write smaller checks? Smaller checks need fewer meetings, so investors decide quickly. This lets them back founders early, before other investors notice them. * Q3. How much money do these funds usually invest? Checks are usually a few hundred thousand dollars. Cleo Capital invests between $100,000 and $1 million in very early startups. * Q4. Do women-led funds change what happens after funding? Yes. A University of Michigan study found women-led startups backed by all-male firms exited 25-30% less often than comparable companies. October 1, 2026

OneTrust appoints Stephanie Glenn as Chief Revenue Officer. OneTrust has appointed Stephanie Glenn as its new Chief Revenue Officer, adding an enterprise software veteran with more than two decades of experience to its executive team. As the new OneTrust Chief Revenue Officer, Glenn will focus on strengthening the company's commercial execution and supporting its next phase of growth. She will also work to expand the value OneTrust delivers to customers as organisations increase their use of data and artificial intelligence. The Sydney announcement on September 10 follows Glenn's senior leadership roles at Salesforce, Maven Clinic and IBM. OneTrust Chief Revenue Officer brings Salesforce experience. Glenn spent 14 years at Salesforce in senior executive leadership positions. Most recently, she served as Executive Vice President of AMER Digital Sales. In that position, Glenn oversaw the $2 billion ARR Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud businesses across North America. Earlier in her career, Glenn held leadership roles at IBM. She later helped Salesforce expand its small and medium-sized business operations into new markets. Glenn also led Salesforce's 3,500-person New York office. In addition, she played a key role in expanding the company's Marketing Cloud business as Salesforce integrated several acquisitions. OneTrust Chief Revenue Officer adds commercial leadership. After leaving Salesforce, Glenn joined Maven Clinic as Chief Commercial Officer. There, she led efforts to bring sales, marketing and client success teams together as the company expanded its go-to-market operations. Her experience now brings another senior enterprise software executive into OneTrust as the company positions its platform around data and AI governance. Glenn also serves as a Board Member of Project Sunshine and sits on the Tech MBA Advisory Board at the NYU Stern School of Business. OneTrust CEO welcomes Stephanie Glenn. John Heyman, Chief Executive Officer of OneTrust, said, "Stephanie is a proven go-to-market leader with deep experience scaling enterprise software businesses and building high-performing teams. Her operational discipline, customer focus, and track record of translating market opportunity into durable growth make her the right leader to help OneTrust strengthen our commercial execution and deliver even greater value to customers. We're thrilled to welcome her to the executive leadership team." The appointment comes as OneTrust continues to position governance as a key part of enterprise AI adoption. Businesses face growing pressure to use AI while maintaining oversight of the data, systems and processes behind it. Stephanie Glenn on OneTrust's next phase of growth. Stephanie Glenn, Chief Revenue Officer of OneTrust, said, "Throughout my career, I've been drawn to companies with strong foundations and the opportunity to scale into something even bigger. OneTrust is exactly that kind of company, with deep customer relationships, a differentiated platform, and a clear opportunity to be the trusted governance layer organisations need to turn AI into business value without losing control. I'm excited to work with the team to sharpen our go-to-market execution, deliver more value to our customers, and support OneTrust's next phase of growth." Glenn's appointment gives OneTrust an executive with experience scaling large enterprise software operations as the company pursues further growth in the data and AI governance market. About OneTrust. OneTrust, the AI-Ready Governance Platform(TM), enables innovation through the responsible use of data and AI. Trusted by thousands of companies, including over half of the Fortune 500, Cyber News Live help businesses govern well and move fast, turning responsible data use into a catalyst for growth. To learn more, follow OneTrust on LinkedIn or visit www.onetrust.com. (C) 2026 OneTrust LLC. All rights reserved. OneTrust and the OneTrust logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of OneTrust LLC in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Fix U.S. Maternity care: join the movement. August 20, 2026 Every week, the headlines deliver another gut-punch to American health care: rural hospitals shutting down labor and delivery units, midwifery practices forced to close their doors, rising maternal mortality rates, and a rapidly shrinking women's health workforce. Amidst a worsening crisis and skyrocketing care costs, a single question haunts every parent, practitioner, and advocate: How can Grow Midwives do better? The answer starts with a fundamental shift in perspective. Years ago, while teaching a doctoral epidemiology course, I immersed myself in the work of Dr. Hans Rosling - the visionary Swedish physician who transformed global health data into breathtaking, hopeful visual narratives. Rosling proved that when statistics meet human-centered leadership, predictive action becomes unstoppable. His foundational belief remains profoundly true today: Grow Midwives can build a better world if Grow Midwives care enough to work toward it. That belief is no longer just an ideal - it is turning into action. A seismic shift in American maternity care is officially underway. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Olivia Walton Foundation recently announced that Dr. Neel Shah - renowned obstetrician/gynecologist and former CMO of Maven - has stepped up as President of Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies. This isn't about politics, policy debate, or finger-pointing. It is a unified, relentless charge to mobilize business leaders, healthcare providers, faith leaders, and everyday advocates around one non-negotiable objective: to cut U.S. maternal deaths in half in five years, making America the safest place in the world to give birth. Dr. Shah is a persistent, compassionate leader who puts patients first. Working alongside him on the Heartland Forward Maternal Health Advisory Board, the momentum is tangible - and the movement is open to everyone. Grow Midwives cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while mothers and babies pay the price for a broken system. Real change requires collective action. Take your seat at the table. Sign up today, get involved, and join the MOMTOURAGE at hmhba.org/#join. The ride to transform U.S. maternal health starts now.