FoundHer Takes on Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

InQbation Lab Gives Women Entrepreneurs Access to Resources

In 2022, Pitchbook found that venture capital funds given to women-founded startups made up just 1.9% of the total; women of color received 0.05% and less.

The InQbation Lab’s FoundHer program seeks to change this narrative. Starting at the end of 2022, FoundHer put three first-time women Northwestern faculty entrepreneurs through an intensive, six-week fellowship that included one-on-one mentoring with an industry professional, a seminar series, pitch presentation coaching, professional development, and a trip to Boston to meet with local venture capitalist firms and network with the Cambridge/Boston investment community.

The inaugural FoundHer cohort included Feinberg School of Medicine faculty Ruchi Gupta, founder of Yobee Care, which focuses on balancing the microbiome of the scalp and skin; and Julie Kim, founder of NUVitro, which is developing a multi-well microfluidic platform for studying organ physiology in vitro; and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, founder of Neuroplastica, a high-throughput drug discovery platform that measures neuroplasticity.

Only 11% of university startups have women founders, meaning that the ability to network with other underrepresented entrepreneurs is vital.

Among the seminar speakers were serial entrepreneurs Dr. Shana Kelley, Northwestern faculty member and President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in Chicago; Harvard’s Pam Silver, co-founder of the institution’s Department of Systems Biology; entrepreneur Laura Schewel, whose company StreetLight Data spun out from her work at UC Berkeley; and Cigall Kadoch, a biochemist and cancer biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Center, and Harvard.

The second cohort launched in early 2024 and is focused on first-time graduate student and postdoctoral founders.