Playfair Capital and Global Ventures launched ‘Female Founder Office Hours’ across MENA. They will be hosting virtual mentoring sessions with 150 VCs for over 400 women founders from across MENA, the UK, and Europe on November 10, 2022.

Female Founder Office Hours (FFOH) was launched in London in 2019, with the aim to “break down barriers to investment for female entrepreneurs, notoriously underserved by the global investment community.”

This eighth event is part of an ongoing and long-term commitment to redress the gender imbalance in fundraising and includes expansion to MENA to engage and support the next generation of women founders around the world. 

Each founder meets four investors virtually for one hour to discuss their technology and business model, ask for advice, pitch for investment or find a mentor. The founders meet a mix of local and international investors to receive a diverse perspective on the business they are building and to broaden their network.

The event is being hosted by Playfair Capital, with the support of Dubai-based Global Ventures, Tech Nation, Google for Startups, and Words + Pixels. The previous seven editions saw a total of 5,230 individual mentoring sessions, with 1,307 founders and 200 investors taking part.

“Increasing the pipeline of female founders has been front of mind for regional capital allocators for several years now, so it is really exciting to see top VCs from the ecosystem collaborate for the first edition of Female Founders Office Hours in MENA. While the ecosystem has made important strides in recent years, with 35% of tech entrepreneurs being female in MENA, there is still much work to be done. Female Founders Office Hours aims to create access to capital and build a community of investors for regional female founders. Diversity of leadership and thought are important factors shaping the future of MENA’s entrepreneurial landscape –  female founders are a key part of that,” Sacha Haider, Partner at Global Ventures, stated. 

The 8th edition is also part of FFOH’s continued expansion to new regions, from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, and to offer more female founders the opportunity to grow and scale their businesses by supporting them on their fundraising journey.