Fairygodboss (FGB) is a social network designed for career-minded women that recently announced it raised $10 million in Series A funding co-led by GSV Accelerate and Signal Peak Ventures. This round of funding follows a $3 million round that the company raised in May 2018 and brings the total to $14 million.
This is a big deal because recent data showed that female founders only received 2.2% of venture funding in 2018, according to a company blog post. Fairygodboss plans to use the funding to enhance its existing product suite and expand upon its team.
Fairygodboss was founded by CEO Georgene Huang and President Romy Newman — who both served as executives at Dow Jones. Specifically, Huang was the Head of Enterprise Business and Institutional Products. And Newman was the Head of Digital Advertising Sales, VP Sales in Sales Strategy and GM of the WSJ Newspaper.
Photo: Fairygodboss Co-Founders Romy Newman and Georgene Huang
Huang also worked as a managing director and co-CEO of BMART at Bloomberg Ventures and an investment analyst at Clinton Group and Lehman Brothers. And Newman also worked in managerial roles at Google, Kannon Consulting, and Estee Lauder.
Fairygodboss started off as an anonymous review site similar to Glassdoor before it became a career site. Now Fairygodboss features job listings and employer profiles along with a personalized daily feed and databases for company benefits.
On Fairygodboss, current and former female employees share information about which employers have supportive maternity leave policies and values work-life balance. There are also job reviews and advice columns.
Based on these scores, Fairygodboss has a list of the “best companies for women.” As of right now, the top 10 (in order from 1-10) are Ultimate Software, Protiviti, Boston Scientific, ZS, ADP, Boston Consulting Group, Capital One, Hilton, E. & J. Gallo Winery, AppNexus, and CDW Corporation.
“Four years ago, we — Georgene and Romy — founded Fairygodboss after Georgene had what she likes to call a very bad (but ultimately fortuitous!) day at work. Very suddenly, she was fired from her executive role as part of a management shake-up. She found herself jobless … while two months pregnant. As you can imagine, it wasn’t an ideal situation. However, it did inspire the premise of Fairygodboss: that when we come together, we can improve the workplace for all women,” said the founders in their announcement. “During Georgene’s job search, she wanted to connect with and hear from other women who had gone through something similar. And as she went on interview after interview (while hiding her pregnancy!), she had questions about employers’ parental leave policies, what her work-life balance would be like if she worked there, and whether these employers had women in leadership roles. Was this a place where her career could thrive? She couldn’t find the answers she was looking for easily. Thanks to your contributions and voices, however, some of that hard-to-find intel and connections to other supportive women are now available to millions in the FGB Community.”
Fairygodboss is free for users as the company generates revenue from sponsored content and competitor insights. Currently, Fairygodboss is hitting 3 million visitors every month.
And the company saw 30 times user growth over the last two years. Plus Fairygodboss told VentureBeat that it signed up 100 corporate partners including Apple, General Motors, Home Depot, JPMorgan, and Accenture.
