The Next Giants Cohort? 60% women founded

Giants Applications will open Monday July 31.

Recently Blackbird revealed data on investing in more women founders. It showed that Giants, our widest funnel ecosystem offering, has only 36% of founders in the community who identify as female or non-binary. 

We built Giants with the ambition of it being an accessible community for those not necessarily from central casting to take their first giant leaps. We are yet to realise that ambition. 

To work towards our goal we are committing to 60% of early-stage startups going through Giants having at least one female and/or non-binary founder. 

We are on a mission to find the wildest hearts, wherever they are, right at the beginning.

We have been inspired by the journeys of Giant founders like Amber Linz from Zipr who is upgrading the online retail experience, Michelle Foster whose life's work is to make visible the invisible labour of raising kids with My Family Hands, Abbie Widin from Defy-Hi Robotics, Kristen Migliorini from KomplyAI, and Neala Fulia from More Good Days.

Giants is a community for people wanting to understand and test their startup idea through access to Blackbird’s mentor community. Through Giants we are helping 1000s of founders  realise their boldest ambition, and take a giant leap on their big idea. 

Through Giants, founders have launched their product, found their first customer, gone onto an accelerator and we’ve been lucky enough to invest in a few; like More Good Days, Sauce, and Cotiss.

Just the Beginning

While we know that identification doesn’t equal investment, and this isn’t a conclusive pipeline solution, we also know that female and non-binary peoples don’t identify as founders until later in their journey. We want to empower those at the earliest stage of their journey, as one of our efforts towards better representation in the ecosystem. 

This in no way covers the breadth of diversity representation that Giants has the opportunity to address; we consider this step one. Our current data is patchy beyond gender, so as a secondary step, we will also begin benchmarking who is is using our Giants community and to further build an equitable early stage ecosystem offering.

Want to join the next Giants cohort?

Our eligibility criteria: 

• At least one person in the founding team must have a relationship with Australia and/or New Zealand. This means they either are based here, or are from Australia and/or New Zealand and live remotely. Please note that most of the workshop times and mentor sessions cater to Australian-New Zealand time zones, 
• The startup idea and it’s founders are not part of an intrapreneurship project, and
• The founding team is over 18.

‍

Giants applications will open Monday July 31. Cohort 7 launches September 2023.