Catching up with The51 Fund I Ventures: Who They Are & What They’ve Done

 

Have you met our Fund I portfolio companies? Let us introduce you to the incredible women founders we get to work with at The51!

These ventures are a diverse representation of women-led companies that meet our investment criteria and philosophy in the sectors we know deeply: enterprise and consumer digital platforms, fintech, healthtech, cleantech, agtech, and more.

Together—through our investing, our GP expertise, and leveraging the human capital of our community—we’re proud to be powering future-fit, diverse, innovative companies with investment capital.

Get to know the ventures funded in our Feminist Fund I and some of the exciting momentum and milestones they’ve hit since we’ve backed them.

👩 Co-Founders: Mikayla Wujec, Naomi Blackman

🤝Invested: 2022

🛒 Consumer Commerce

📍 Toronto, ON

 

Founded by National Geographic Explorer Mikayla Wujec and fashion marketing leader Naomi Blackman, alder apparel is a Toronto-based outdoor clothing brand focused on inclusive sizing, community-informed design, and sustainable and ethical production. Sharing their frustrations with existing options for women, the duo created alder to fuse function and fashion to contrast the performance-driven, hardcore athletic brands currently dominating the space and speak to a wide audience often neglected in the outdoor apparel market.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Kasey Machin, Lana Cuthbertson, Jacqueline Comer

🤝Invested: 2022

📱 Platform

📍 Edmonton, AB

 

Co-founded by Kasey Machin, Lana Cuthbertson, and Jacqueline Comer, Areto Labs is an Edmonton-based venture that uses artificial intelligence to protect brands and people by analyzing sentiment on social media. Areto Labs’ technology gives users and brands personalized insights into key trends that allow them to moderate online abuse and deliver communication campaigns that build trust and brand love.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Katie Wilson, Nick Wilson

🤝Invested: 2021

🌱 Food & AgTech

📍 Los Angeles, CA, USA

 

After years of suffering from severe IBS and being disappointed by the lack of options for low FODMAP food offerings, Katie Wilson co-founded BelliWelli alongside her husband Nick Wilson. BelliWelli is a Los Angeles-based food tech company that’s creating delicious gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sugar, and certified low FODMAP soft-baked bars for the gut-challenged community (sufferers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), and Leaky Gut).

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founder: Karen Danudjaja

🤝Invested: 2022

🛒 Consumer Commerce

📍 Vancouver, BC

 

Having experienced digestion, sleep, and hormone imbalances from espresso and syrup-based drinks, Karen Danudjaja co-founded Blume to change the face of coffee time across North America. Vancouver-based Blume is a flavour-first functional beverage brand that bridges the gap between the wellness aisle and cafés, recreating your favourite lattes with the magic of superfoods.

Highlights:

  • Announced as a top three finalist for both the Emerging Brand (Blume) and Woman Entrepreneur Award (Karen) with the BC Food & Beverage Association

  • Highlighted in Forbes as one of 22 Asian American- And Pacific Islander-Owned Brands That Should Be On Your Radar

  • Found online and in over 1500 retail locations, including Safeway, Indigo, Anthropologie, Wholefoods, Erewhon, Well.ca, and Amazon.ca

  • Now available in over 400 doors across Canada with Loblaw Companies Limited and Real Canadian Superstore.

  • Media attention and features in major publications such as Elle Canada, Canadian Business, Business Insider, and more

 

👩 Co-Founders: Taran Ghatrora, Bunny Ghatrora

🤝Invested: 2020

🛒 Consumer Commerce

📍 Vancouver, BC

 

Blume is a Gen Z puberty-focused lifestyle brand offering education, safer personal care products, and at its core—community. Founded by sisters Taran and Bunny Ghatrora, Blume’s product offerings include organic pads and tampons, deodorant, face cleanser, face oil, acne treatment, face spray, moisturizer, and cramp oil.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Rachel Drew, Krystian Olszanski, Rachelle Perron

🤝Invested: 2022

📱 Platform

📍 Saskatoon, SK

 

Cadence is a SaaS company that simplifies and supports clients through estate planning and settlement. Headquartered in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and co-founded by Rachel Drew, Krystian Olszanski, and Rachelle Perron, Cadence’s easy-to-use online platform and team of Certified Executor Advisors equips professionals to forge strong, meaningful relationships with their clients by facilitating end-of-life planning and guiding estate settlement.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Kristina Stanley, Mathew Stanley

🤝Invested: 2022

📱 Platform

📍 Toronto, ON

 

Ontario-based Fictionary is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based editing software designed to help writers and editors simplify the story editing process and make it faster and easier by applying universal storytelling structures to every scene. Co-founded by Kristina and Mathew Stanley, Fictionary's creative editing software allows users to evaluate and revise their manuscripts to tell powerful stories readers will naturally connect with.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Julie MacDonell, Sarah Ruest, Dave MacDonell

🤝Invested: 2022

📱 Platform

📍 Hamilton, ON

 

Using Deep AI, Toronto-based Haloo provides users with instant, self-serve professional trademark searches, fail-safe trademark applications, and automated brand enforcement in one place. Co-founded by Julie MacDonell, Sarah Ruest, and Dave MacDonell, Haloo is disrupting and democratizing brand protection for businesses across North America that perform much better than the best trademark search houses and lawyers—for a fraction of the cost.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Rachel Bartholomew

🤝Invested: 2021

🩺 HealthTech

📍 Waterloo, ON

 

Hyivy is an Ontario-based FemTech company founded by Rachel Bartholomew. Addressing the issues she experienced personally after recovering from cervical cancer, Rachel developed Hyivy to revolutionize outdated and inadequate pelvic health solutions. Hyivy has created the first intelligent and holistic pelvic rehabilitation device for women experiencing symptoms of pelvic cancers and diseases. The multi-therapy pelvic rehab system allows patients to be proactive with their recovery, receive real-time progress updates, and clinicians can evaluate the effectiveness of their treatment.  

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Sumit Sahdev, Garima Sahdev

🤝Invested: 2022

📱 Platform

📍 Toronto, ON

 

Headquartered in Ontario, Jombone is a “LinkedIn + SAP/Oracle Human Capital Management” for businesses’ Industrial Resource Planning needs. Co-founded by Sumit Sahdev and Garima Sahdev, Jombone provides businesses with access to a live network of local candidates and digitizes all aspects of industrial staffing, such as acquisition, workforce management, scheduling, timesheets, payroll, wage processing, payments, and reporting.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Chloe Smith

🤝Invested: 2022

📱 Platform

📍 Calgary, AB

 

Led by Chloe Smith, Calgary-based Mercator AI is a data intelligence company for the construction industry. Mercator’s B2B platform enables companies to detect upstream project opportunities daily, uncover new market opportunities, and grow existing business faster. 

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Helena Kaylin

🤝 Invested: 2020

🛒 Consumer Commerce

📍 Los Angeles, CA, USA

 

Founded by Helena Kaylin, a former Calgarian and an expert in bra development, MINDD is the first bra and intimates company dedicated to designing wireless solutions specifically for D+ breasted women. The direct-to-consumer company has engineered proprietary and patent-pending MINDD™ Tech: a seven-zone support system tailored to the underserved but rapidly growing share of women who wear a D+ cup bra.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Simran Kang, Alice Chen

🤝Invested: 2021

💳 FinTech

📍 Vancouver, BC

 

Leveraging their years of experience and knowledge building in the finance and family office space, co-founders Simran Kang and Alice Chen created MyFO as a platform to help families & individuals start and grow a family office to manage their wealth. As a SaaS tool operating in the FinTech space, the easy-to-use platform provides net worth snapshots, curated guidance, personalized workflows, and secure management and safekeeping of all important information about a family office.

Highlights:

 

👩 CEO: Lorraine Kageni Maina

🤝Invested: 2021

💳 FinTech

📍 San Francisco, CA, USA; ON, Canada; Kenya

 

Led by Kenya-based CEO Lorraine Kageni Maina Pngme is a FinTech venture based in San Francisco that builds tools to understand users' financial behaviour to make data-driven lending decisions. Geared toward emerging markets (toehold in Africa, focused on Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria), the platform has the potential to grow globally in markets for financial institutions to create innovative products for the underserved population.

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Brianna Blaney, Aria Hahn

🤝Invested: 2021

💳 FinTech

📍 Vancouver, BC

 

Vancouver-based Pocketed was co-founded by Brianna Blaney and Aria Hahn to make grant funding more accessible to every business owner. Through their powerful grant matching platform designed to do all the heavy lifting, Pocketed helps companies get informed about the more than $2.9 billion annual available grant funding in Canada.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Lauryn Vaughn

🤝Invested: 2021

💳 FinTech

📍 Calgary, AB / Austin, TX

 

ReUpp was founded by Lauryn Vaughn, an entrepreneur based in Calgary, who is also the founder of the luxury retail consignment brand, The Revente. ReUpp is a Calgary-based FinTech brand creating a resale economy at the time of first purchase by partnering with retailers to offer a guaranteed buy-back. Currently beta testing, the technology places a widget on a retailer’s website to facilitate the option to consign the garment at a resale price right at the time of purchase, as well as capture post-purchase data extending the customers' life with the company.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Marie Chevrier

🤝Invested: 2020

📱 Platform

📍 Toronto, ON

 

Founder & CEO Marie Chevrier leveraged her background in Venture Capital and passion for marketing and technology to transform how consumer product companies distribute samples and collect data. Sampler is a digital product sampling platform distributing direct-to-home samples to over 3 million consumers on the platform and post-sampling survey data in the U.S., Canada, France, and 23 countries via client demand to thousands of brands including Kraft-Heinz, Nestle, and L’Oreal. Sampler has been named one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies two years in a row.

Highlights:

  • Acquired Abeo to deepen footprint in the beauty industry

  • Announced their second acquisition in just four months: adding AI and UGC capabilities via acquisition of AdMass

  • Retailer partnership with Kroger continues to deliver strong results for brands and showcases conversion increases directly related to Sampler

  • Media attention and features in major publications such as The Globe and Mail, multiple BetaKit stories, Women’s Wear Daily, and more

 

👩 Founder: Bethany Deshpande

🤝Invested: 2021

🌱 Food & AgTech

📍 Halifax, NS

 

SomaDetect is a precision dairy technology startup on a mission to help farmers make the best possible milk. Established by Dr. Bethany Deshpande, SomaDetect uses a cutting-edge in-line sensor and software system to detect health and reproductive indicators in dairy cows to offer dairy producers a reliable source of milk-based data directly from their milking line. 

Highlights:

 

👩 Co-Founders: Tina Rinker, Bob Shepherd

🤝Invested: 2021

🩺 HealthTech

📍 Calgary, AB

 

Co-founded by Tina Rinker and Bob Shepherd, Syantra is a Calgary-based FemTech company that has developed a liquid biopsy test (i.e., a blood test) to detect the presence of breast cancer. Syantra’s liquid biopsy aims to have accurate, fast results and increase the chances of early diagnosis, especially for women with dense breast tissue where mammograms have lower accuracy levels. With the mission to make early cancer detection part of routine healthcare, Syantra is doing so with a testing experience that is quicker, more accessible, and more accurate in detecting tumours.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Jana Rieger

🤝Invested: 2021

🩺 HealthTech

📍 Edmonton, AB

 

True Angle is an Edmonton-based startup founded by Dr. Jana Rieger, using personalized exercises and remote clinician monitoring for improved therapy. Their first product, the Mobili-T®, is a mobile, user-friendly health device for individuals with dysphagia to see, learn about, and adhere to their swallowing exercises.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Bobbie Racette

🤝Invested: 2021

📱 Platform

📍 Calgary, AB

 

After being passed over for jobs again and again despite being more than qualified, Bobbie Racette founded Virtual Gurus to help workers from underrepresented communities find high-quality employment and match employers with skilled virtual assistants (VAs). Virtual Gurus is a talent-as-a-service platform that finds, hires, and remotely trains qualified North American VAs—especially those who may traditionally have faced barriers to employment.

Highlights:

 

👩 Founder: Carlyn Loncaric

🤝Invested: 2020

🩺 HealthTech

📍 Vancouver, BC

 

VodaSafe—an alumni company of Creative Destruction Lab founded by engineer Carlyn Loncaric—has developed the AquaEye®: a patent-pending handheld sonar device that uses AI to interpret motion, light, and temperature sensors for waterfront rescue. The AquaEye® is designed to eliminate rescue challenges and stress due to speed of dispatch and poor water clarity, ultimately increasing the rescues' accuracy, speed, and lifesaving ability.

Highlights:

 

The impact of our Fund I portfolio companies has been incredible—we couldn’t be more proud to invest in these founders who are building impressive ventures.

And this is just the start.

While we continue to build positive, long-term relationships with our Fund I portfolio companies, we’re excited to see how our future funds will keep building the Financial Feminist™ Economy.

Fund II is well on its way to an equally promising and successful future, and we look forward to harnessing the power of our collective to keep up the momentum of activating capital into future-fit women-led and gender-diverse businesses.

If you’re interested in learning more about Fund II and investing in the world you want to see, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We’d love to connect!

Kelly Tidalgo