- Alice, a company that guides business owners through this growth, announced it raised a Series A round of funding from Bumble, Serena Ventures, SVB, and several angel investors
Alice — a company that guides business owners through their growth founded by Elizabeth (McKee) Gore and Carolyn Rodz — announced it raised a Series A round of funding from Bumble and Serena Ventures. Bumble and Serena Ventures are joining SVB Financial Group (Silicon Valley Bank’s holding company) as lead investors as well as Cathie Reid AM, Jean Case, Phyllis Newhouse, Shatter Fund, and Signia Venture Partners.
Alice is aggregating some of the most comprehensive sets of SMB trend analysis and insights in the world while supporting its goal of removing barriers to vital resources that women, people of color, veterans, and LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs face when launching businesses.
With this round of funding, Alice plans to give founders the opportunity to launch and scale their businesses. The amounts were undisclosed.
“Alice helps connect business owners to resources important for their individual industry growth. As an investor in the company, we are working to ensure that women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and all underrepresented groups in business are given equal access to funding, networking, and services that are vital to success,” said Serena Ventures head and professional tennis icon Serena Williams.
Bumble and Williams are going to facilitate the expansion of Alice’s machine learning capabilities to provide carefully curated business resources to Alice users based on their stage of growth, location, industry, etc.
“Alice could not be a better fit for Bumble as we expand on our mission to create empowering connections in people’s work lives as well as their personal relationships,” added Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd. “At the end of the day, we work to give women the tools they need to make the first move, and investing in Alice’s platform – geared towards uplifting women and other underrepresented small business owners – is a great way for us to continue to get more involved in our local communities and ultimately help create positive change in the broader business community.”
The #MeToo morality cause is also integral to the company’s Series A round. This cause reinforces the commitment of both Alice and its investors to ensure Alice board members and voting stockholders are held accountable for choices that could affect Alice’s workforce and community of over 100,000 business owners. And the clause requires stockholders to use corporate governance mechanisms to vote for removal of any board member in the event of a #MeToo event, racial discrimination, and/or sexual orientation discrimination incident.
“Having business leaders like Serena Williams and Whitney Wolfe Herd as part owners in Alice has created a dream team of savvy investors,” explained Gore. “We see our partnership as an extension of the work Serena and Bumble have already done to advance women and New Majority owners in business, and we are thrilled to welcome their perspectives and input as we expand our reach into local business communities and bring forward business for all in 2020.”
