In the last 4 years, 500 has backed over 200 women-led companies like Wildfire, Viki, Barkbox, Moonfruit, TheRealReal, Tradesy, and ipsy. With the 500 Women syndicate, we're doubling down even further. Over the next year, we’re aiming to invest $1M across 10 women-backed companies out of the 500 portfolio, plus an additional $1-5M total in these companies via the 500 Women syndicate backers. This means for each company, they’ll get $50-100K from us (our standard investment amount) and up to an additional $500K from our syndicate backers.

Backers can be both women and men. But we especially want to challenge more women to make investments, so we hope to see a good number of female investors come on as backers.

We will select 10 companies a year from the 500 Startups portfolio to syndicate. Companies must have at least one female founder who owns >= 10% of the company.