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V O L . X X V I I N O. X X V I N OV E M B E R 2 9 , 2 0 2 1 20 B A N K I N G / F I N A N C E / I N S U R A N C E F O C U S to them: "You're going to have to take my word on this." From those kinds of disconnects with investors, she learned the importance of reading a room and improved her storytelling skills with every pitch. "e better equipped I was able to paint a clear picture, the more I was able to not only find the right investors quickly, but also some surprising cham- pions," says VanHaren, who raised $1.15 million last August in a seed round led by San Diego-based MooDoos Investments. Another example is Torey Penrod-Cambra, co- founder and chief marketing officer of Portland-based industrial software maker HighByte, which raised $1.125 million in pre-seed funding in 2020 and won the $20,000 Gorham Savings Bank LaunchPad competi- tion in June. Caught off guard by questions she believes her male co-founders have never been asked, she now answers with a query of her own. "When I've been asked questions about my personal life — specifically my ability to balance parenthood with entrepreneurship — it reminds me that gender inequity is still pervasive in our homes and professional lives," she says. "Rather than get upset, it's more productive to respond with empathy and encourage the inquirer how they were able to balance those demands in their own life." She also says that answering a question with a question is a good strategy in general, to tease out the "why" behind a question and get investors more engaged in the dialogue. Among more seasoned entrepreneurs, Kay Aikin of Dynamic Grid — a Portland-based startup that designs intelligent energy for electrical grids — is having a tough time in her effort to raise funds for a solar project in Maine. "It's time-consuming, it's frustrating, and I'm not good with rejection," Aikin says after fruitless calls to investors as far afield as Ukraine, and a recent rejection — from a female investor in Canada — via a three-sentence email curtly thanking Dynamic Grid "for you-all's time." Hoping to do better with a Boston community venture group she's pitched to, Aikin says she'd like to see all venture capitalists look beyond what she calls "pattern matching" in vetting applications, and see more women on the financial side, noting: "We need more women investors, and we need more women tech investors." Meanwhile in Rockland, Shannon Kinney of digital marketing agency Dream Local Digital has some regrets about her own fundraising approach, saying, "My feminine tendencies wanted to make a deal work, and I made the deal work in a way that did not support enough future growth. My inves- tors were so motivated about job creation in Maine, and I zeroed in on that part of the story," she says. "I should have broadened my horizons regardless of how people felt." Now leading a company that has downsized by half during the pandemic, Kinney says she appre- ciates all her investors, particularly Sandra Stone, chair emerita of the Maine Angels group of early- stage private equity investors. "As a female founder, you need smart money, not just any money," Kinney says, "and Sandra for me was smart money." Heather Blease, owner and CEO of Brunswick- based call-center company SaviLinx, which raised $330,000 in 2015 from investors including Maine Angels and Bangor Angels, feels similarly though she's also encountered hurdles in past pitches. "One of my challenges," she says, "was that my company did not have the intrigue of an interest- ing novel technology app, intellectual property or an invention with the potential of hitting it out of the park as an overnight success." More female checkwriters Nationwide, the number of female checkwriters at venture capital firms has increased by nearly 3.5% since 2019, with women now holding 15.4% of general part- ner positions, as documented by PitchBook. at's sig- nificant because the presence of female investors in the room has been widely shown to boost chances of suc- cess for a female-founded company to secure funding. More women are also entering angel invest- ing, which PitchBook notes is an unheralded but important cog in the venture capital conveyor belt. Nationwide, the number of female angels has grown from fewer than 100 in 2010 to 895 today, as the pool keeps expanding. at's certainly true at Maine Angels, with about 30 female members out of 94 total and eight women-led startups in its portfolio including Atlantic Sea Farms, HighByte, pumpspotting and Dream Local Digital. » C O N T I N U E D F RO M P R E V I O U S PA G E P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Analytically, you would want to be funding more women because those businesses are returning better capital. — Nina Scheepers Maine Venture Fund Amy VanHaren, founder of pumpspotting, raised $1.15 million in a recent seed round. P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y O F D R E A M L O C A L D I G I TA L Shannon Kinney, founder of Dream Local Digital, says it is important not just to raise capital, but to raise "smart money" from investors who can offer wise counsel.

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