Anu Duggal

Anu Duggal co-founded Exclusively.in, an India-based private-sale e-commerce company backed by Accel Partners and Tiger Global, which was acquired by Myntra in 2011.

In 2014 — when under 2% of venture capital reached female founders — she launched Female Founders Fund on the premise of investing exclusively in women. She has said it took roughly 700 meetings to raise the first vehicle.

The firm has since invested in more than 75 companies and raised around $125M across its funds, with limited partners including Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures and Goldman Sachs. Portfolio companies include the virtual-care provider Maven and the lender Tala.

How she invests

The thesis has narrowed rather than widened over a decade. What began as a broad mandate to back women founders has tightened toward healthcare, personal care, climate and vertical software — the categories the firm concluded it underwrites better than others. A fund that runs long enough to learn where its edge actually was, and then acts on that by giving things up, is behaving unusually. The more common pattern is for the mandate to expand as the fund size does.

What an individual investor can take from it

The 700-meeting figure is the most useful number on this page. Access, not judgement, is the binding constraint in early-stage investing: the best opportunities are allocated through networks before they are ever marketed, and a network is built by volume long before it looks like anything. An individual starting out is buying the same asset with time rather than capital — enough conversations, over enough years, that deals begin arriving instead of having to be hunted.

Where the lesson stops

Volume builds access, but the returns to it are not linear and they arrive late. Most of those 700 meetings produced nothing, and the network only became useful once enough of them had compounded. Anyone treating this as a tactic to run for six months will conclude, correctly, that it is not working. It is a multi-year investment of time with no interim signal, which is precisely why so few people complete it.

Sources

• Fortune via Yahoo Finance — 700 meetings to launch Female Founders Fund ↗
• Ms. Magazine — Anu Duggal is betting big on women ↗

Facts here reflect public reporting at time of writing — roles and fund affiliations change; verify current details directly with Female Founders Fund.

Other investor profiles