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NEW YORK, April 27, 2023 – Anthemis, a specialist asset manager that creates value from driving financial systems change, today announced additional investments from institutions including  Visa and BMO for its Female Innovators Lab (FIL) Fund. Anchored by Barclays, with investment from Aviva, the fund now totals $50 million, making it the largest early-stage fintech fund focused on female founders. With this latest raise, the Fund will invest in additional early-stage companies and continue its focus on designing, sourcing, and scaling female-founded embedded finance startups.

Launched in 2019, the FIL Fund actively invests in women-led startups across North America, UK and Europe. FIL’s approach is modeled on Anthemis’ embedded finance investment thesis, targeting business models that deploy financial services within a diverse set of industries including sustainability, beauty, ecommerce, and more. FIL combines Anthemis early-stage asset management capacities with a singular network of strategic investors, diversifying deal sourcing and providing peerless strategic support to the FIL portfolio.

Through the venture studio and fund, Anthemis has sourced over 1,500 early-stage female-founded companies and shaped and funded portfolio companies like Addition (a workplace financial wellness platform), Pile (a cash management tool for businesses), and Upkeep (a marketplace for beauty treatments).

“Women are half of the world’s population, they control 70% of global household spending, profits are higher when they’re present in the c-suite, and the startups they build have a more rapid path to exit – but somehow, women-led companies still raised just two percent of all US venture investment last year. Female founder businesses are a massive market opportunity, yet chronically underfunded. FIL is purpose-built to seize that opportunity, helping women develop high-growth, high-impact startups at the intersection of finance, technology, and society,” said the Female Innovators Lab Team. “Expanding with a partner like Visa – a world leader in digital payments – and BMO – the 8th largest bank in North America by assets – gives us the capital, strategic partners, and global reach to unlock a new cohort of women leaders blazing the trail for fintech and embedded finance.”

“Women power economies around the world, yet they remain underrepresented in the fintech sector with many barriers to overcome,” said Charlotte Hogg, Visa Chief Executive Officer, Europe. “At Visa, we believe partnering with diverse businesses, banks and fintechs is essential. Only by doing so can innovative financial and business services be nurtured that cater to the needs of all communities and underrepresented groups. We are excited to partner with Anthemis to execute on our joint purpose of supporting women’s economic advancement and to help bring the benefits of going digital to everyone, everywhere.”

As one of the earliest asset managers to establish a diversity and inclusion mandate, Anthemis is uniquely suited to lead FIL. Women account for 69% of the people across investments, 48% of portfolio company founders are women or people of color and 58% of all employees at Anthemis are women.

“BMO’s investment in Anthemis’ Female Innovators Lab Fund is aligned with our Zero Barriers to Inclusion strategy, which includes creating economic progress and removing barriers to the inclusion of women and women-owned businesses everywhere,” said Andrew Harrison, Head of U.S. Partnerships at BMO. “Through our support for FIL and the continued success of WMNfintech, North America’s largest nonprofit fintech industry program for women-led fintechs developed by BMO and 1871, we are bridging the gender gap by giving more women the opportunity to bring innovative technology forward.”

To learn more about the Female Innovators Lab Fund or to pitch the team, please visit https://www.anthemis.com/female-innovators-lab/

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About BMO 

Serving customers for 200 years and counting, BMO is a highly diversified financial services provider – the 8th largest bank, by assets, in North America. With total assets of $1.15 trillion as of January 31, 2023, and a team of diverse and highly engaged employees, BMO provides a broad range of personal and commercial banking, wealth management and investment banking products and services to 12 million customers and conducts business through three operating groups: Personal and Commercial Banking, BMO Wealth Management and BMO Capital Markets.

About Anthemis

Anthemis is a specialist asset manager that creates value from driving financial systems change by investing in businesses committed to resiliency, transparency, access, and equity. Founded in 2010, our deep understanding of financial systems, endless passion for emerging technologies, and steadfast commitment to social purpose inspire everything we do. By creating fertile ground for a diverse group of startups, investors, entrepreneurs, institutions, academics, and visionaries to converge, we believe we can solve the financial system’s most pressing challenges.

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The Anthemis Group holding company structure, coupled with a balance sheet of more than $100 million, gives us the capacity to implement that theory of systems change. In close partnership with our holding company shareholders, which include some of the world’s largest financial institutions, we have invested in landmark research (like Carlota Perez’s upcoming Beyond The Technological Revolution), funded early-career fellowships, seeded category standouts via our balance sheet (including Climate Corporation, Betterment, and eToro), backed first-generation venture funds like Reshma Sohoni’s Seedcamp and Courtney Leimkuhler’s Springbank, and sustained a global network of financial services change agents through media and convenings.

The most developed expression of the Anthemis systems change engine is our asset management business. Established in 2016, Anthemis Asset Management has built, seeded, and scaled over 200 financial services companies. With $1.2 billion in assets under management, our approach to asset management – sector-focused, sector-backed, purpose-led – is a unique and vital input to our mission. Through it, we have partnered with best-in-class entrepreneurs and insitutions to strengthen small enterprises, democratize cash management, build resilience in supply chains, create responsive new insurance products, finance the climate transition, and much more.

As we have continued to invest in the capacities of Anthemis Group – including a first full-time hire to lead our efforts on intellectual capital – the distinction from the asset management business has felt increasingly important. In 2022, we began the process of establishing Anthemis Asset Management as a standalone legal entity and a flagship holding of Anthemis Group that could exist independently and sustainably. We are overjoyed that this work is now complete.

As an independent entity, Anthemis Asset Management must have independent leadership and it is with great pleasure that we announce Harry Harrison as CEO of Anthemis Asset Management. Harry is a longstanding member of the Anthemis team who embodies our values and has three decades of experience building, backing, leading, and transforming global financial services businesses. Harry brings a clear vision for the future of financial services and the role that asset management plays in shaping it. His broad range of experience – from payments and capital markets to business banking and wealth – will help Anthemis Asset Management thrive and grow as a cornerstone holding of Anthemis Group.

With the asset management unit established, our longtime friend and colleague Briana van Strijp, who led these transition efforts as Group CEO, will be stepping out of that role. We’re delighted that Bri will join our Strategic Advisory Board, where she will continue to advance our mission. We are deeply grateful to Bri for her successful stewardship of this critical phase in the Anthemis lifecycle and for her work to systematize our vision and values.

We are profoundly excited about what the future holds for Anthemis Group and Anthemis Asset Management. We are sharing the conclusion of this transition phase just a week after industry benchmarks placed our latest flagship fund’s performance in the top five percent of venture funds. Earlier in May, we convened a jam-packed annual investor summit and announced the final close of what is now the largest early-stage fund in the world focused on female financial services entrepreneurs. We continue to rank among the most active fintech and insurtech investors in the world, most recently welcoming Flyby and Agreena to the Anthemis portfolio. And everywhere we look, we see promising entrepreneurs seizing massive opportunities at the bleeding edge of Embedded Finance – a paradigm that we fully believe is still in the earliest stages of possibility.

With so many important pieces in place, we look forward to sharing more fantastic news with you over the next few months.

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