HERmesa is a platform that connects women funders and founders to build the future through investment and entrepreneurship.

HERMESA

HERmesa

HERMESA is a UK based angel syndicate investing in extraordinary female (co)founded start-ups. 

We are a community of operators who know what it takes to build successful start-ups and we invest smart money – capital and expertise – to help change the funding landscape for women founders.

🎉Many congratulations to Wibke Stoffers, HERMESA CMO, for taking home the prize for Best Women Led Investment in Innovation at the UK Business Angels Association awards last night. 🎉

Wibke received this award for the extraordinary post-deal support that she has provided to the CEO of Byway, Cat Jones, over multiple investment rounds.  

Although this award is specifically tied to her work on Byway, Wibke could have received the prize for the support that she provides to any (all!) of her portfolio companies.
 
Wibke is a tireless advocate and advisor once she invests in a company, providing demonstrable value to her portfolio of startups.  Sometimes her support is simply to be a ‘thought partner’ to CEOs as they struggle with a particular issue, but other times, Wibke rolls up her sleeves and dives in, helping her investee companies with projects  including running brand workshops, helping with go-to-market and channel/customer prioritisation, refining pitch decks and securing follow-on funding. 

While HERMESA celebrates this very well-deserved award for Wibke, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that HERmesa has another 200+ investors in its community who are also operators turned angels and who also provide targeted high value support to their investee companies. 💪. Adding value above and beyond capital is core to the HERmesa proposition and we are very pleased that this support has now been recognised as ‘award winning’!  

Congrats again to Wibke and Cat!

Massive congratulations to HERmesa portfolio company Byway and CEO and Founder Cat Jones on raising a £5m oversubscribed Series A funding round!

Byway is the first tech platform for 100% flight free holidays. Byway makes it easy to go on multi-stop, journey-based holidays that are fully personalised to the holidaymakers’ interests and take in destinations off the beaten track. 

We are so proud of how far Byway has come since HERmesa first invested in its pre-seed round in March 2021. Back then, we saw a hugely impressive founder in Cat Jones and a significant market opportunity in slow travel, with Byway as the first mover... but Cat was still biking tickets across town herself to ensure the on-time departure of her first customers! Fast forward 3 1/2 years and Byway has served well over 4,000 customers with a whopping 95% giving 5 star reviews. What’s more, Byway customers have saved 3,045 tonnes of carbon versus flying which is the equivalent of 18,270 trees. 

HERMESA investors invest for both profit and purpose and Byway is hugely delivering on both.

We spoke with the brilliant Cat Jones CEO and Founder of Byway about her successful fundraise and why she wanted HERMESA investors on her cap table ... even for her over-subscribed Series A round!

Q: What are some of the things that the funds from this round will enable you to do?
The funds will be used to accelerate the development of Byway’s unique journey-planning technology, JourneyAI, and to fuel its expansion into new regions.

Q: Why did you want HERMESA on your cap table? 
HERmesa angels have been fabulously helpful since HERmesa first invested in our pre seed, lending expertise by joining advisory groups to support our leadership team and welcoming us to their events. Diversity of thought is crucial to the success of any company. Being a female founded B Corp, having a female-forward and diversity-focused investment network on our cap table is something we're hugely proud of and thankful for. 

HERmesa investors are very excited to continue to support Byway on its mission to make flight-free travel mainstream. 

And if you haven’t booked your summer holiday yet, why not have a look on https://www.byway.travel/ for a fabulous multi-stop sustainable trip to destinations off the beaten track? 


Olga Pantelyat Sneh Shah Emma Blackburn Deborah Gruenberger Zahra Subjally Mikko Hautanen Fei Chin Kaw Sara Tateno Reema Desai Nisha Uduwawela Dolapo Adeyemi Glenda Levin Tatyana Staneva Mandeep Gill Machela Sathekga Tammy Hongyu H. Joanna C. Hannah Grinsted Symmie Swil Stephanie Wetmore Carla F. Avila

HERMESA portfolio company, Byway is hiring!  This is an opportunity to join a fantastic team on a mission to change how we travel.  

If interested, read more about the role below and reach out to Byway to apply!

HERMESA is very much looking forward to supporting six women founded startups from the France and UK, alongside our friends from HEC in the UK at the "Startups on Stage" pitch event 3 July.

Do join us by following the registration link below!

It promises to be a great evening.  There are some fantastic entrepreneurs pitching and each company will be introduced by a HERMESA sector expert and experienced angel investor to help contextualise the opportunity.   And did we mention the French champagne on offer?! 🥂

Please note, you do not need to be an HEC alum to attend; this event is open to anyone who is keen to learn more about angel investing and entrepreneurship!

Two years ago, we expanded our signature pitching event beyond the borders of the United States for the first time. Amsterdam was selected as the inaugural host city for Pitch HearstLab International in 2022, followed by Madrid in 2023. Today, we are pleased to unveil the designated city for Pitch HearstLab International 2024.

𝗟𝗢𝗡𝗗𝗢𝗡, here we come! / 𝗣𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗟𝗮𝗯 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗻 - 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟭𝟲𝘁𝗵 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰

Pitch HearstLab is our pitch competition series where we aim to find and fund the best high-growth, women-led startups. After applications are evaluated, finalists will be invited to pitch in-person in front of a live audience and our panel of esteemed judges. 

Winners will receive £100k in investment from HearstLab, plus three months of hands-on support to help your company reach its goals in building the business, product and team.

If you are a women founder leading a B2B/B2B2C tech-enabled company with a live product with some initial traction and you are based in UK/Europe, APPLICATIONS for Pitch HearstLab London ARE NOW OPEN!

APPLY HERE - https://lnkd.in/e8GkPPQd

More info about Pitch HearstLab - https://lnkd.in/egh52cjZ
More info about HearstLab - https://www.hearstlab.com/
More info about Hearst - https://lnkd.in/evpMiVAE

If you want to be part of our live audience and the post-pitch networking session, stay tuned! we will be sharing more information soon!

It has been 1 week since we hosted our sold out HERMESA Open House and we are still buzzing!  It was so great to see 150 women register to learn more about how to become angel investors and take their seat at the table.  

If you missed the event and/or are 'angel curious', read on for the highlights...

We started by discussing the misconception that women angel investors write cheques solely as an act of kindness to support the beleaguered female founders.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  Women angels invest for the exact same reason as men:
💰To make money: this is an investment, not charity!
👩‍🎓 To learn about new businesses & technologies 
💪To back great founders building the future that we want to see

Investing alongside women and into teams led by women CEOs is proven to generate additional returns vs investing with/into all male teams.  We call this benefit the "Diversity Dividend" - and always ask ourselves, "Why wouldn't a smart investor take advantage of this arbitrage!?" (Don't believe us? Check out this page on our website for the stats: https://lnkd.in/e4q-2XvA)

Experienced investors Machela Sathekga & Deborah Gruenberger in a fireside chat with HERmesa CMO Wibke Stoffers shared their learnings with new investors.  Key advice included:
📝 Create an investment thesis and stick with it!  There are a lot of great startups in the world; the best way to optimise your time and money is to stay focused on your own thesis (e.g. backing female founders, startups improving health in Africa, etc)
👀 Ensure the startup has a clear vision for exit...even from the earliest days.  Yes, companies pivot, but they must always be clearly focused on how the company will succeed and return capital to investors.
💸 Start small, learn by doing, join a syndicate - like HERMESA! - but most importantly start & write that first cheque.

Finally, we were thrilled to welcome back HERmesa portfolio company, Flexa, led by the brilliant Molly Johnson-Jones.  It was great to see the huge growth since HERmesa first invested...and we were pretty chuffed to see our initial investment thesis was spot on too! 😉

Although HERmesa only hosts our Open Houses once or twice per year, we are always happy to welcome new members to our syndicate at any time.  Register your interest here: https://lnkd.in/eEuuEsuv

And, if you are a founder keen to pitch HERmesa at one of our monthly pitch events, share your pitch deck here: https://lnkd.in/eum-cMPE

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