When you co-found a company as a woman, you are instantly a minority in the scaleup landscape. In fact, women-founded scaleups account for only 8% of the total value of all European scaleups according to a recent Dealroom report.
While this statistic isn’t very encouraging, since 2017, female founded scaleups are actually growing faster in value in comparison to the European average, growing at 6.5x vs. the average 5.5x.
This above-average growth certainly reflects Gain.pro’s trajectory as a 50% female/male founding team since Nicola Ebmeyer and Frister Haveman have been scaling the business at a highly impressive rate.
Since founding in 2018, Gain.pro has grown by more than 100% in ARR year over year, and since 2020, 200% in team members year over year. This rate of acceleration is significant in the European scaleup landscape, which is why Gain.pro has been recognized in the industry for these efforts.
Gain.pro’s growth journey and achievements
Because of our outstanding growth, in 2022, Gain.pro was named as one of the top scaleups in Europe from Otta’s Rocketist. This list included the top 100 fastest growing companies in Europe based on their impressive fundraising, disruptive missions and exploding headcounts.
In addition to this, we were recognized as one of the top 250 growth companies headquartered in the Netherlands by the ScaleUp Dashboard of the Rotterdam School of Management and the Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship in collaboration with NLgroeit. The companies in this list form their eleventh cohort and were selected based on extraordinary year over year growth.
From this list, Gain.pro was specially named as one of the Top 5 Young Scalers in the Netherlands because of our incredible growth within 5 years of being founded.
All of these nominations are in addition to the individual recognitions that Nicola Ebmeyer, co-founder and co-CEO of Gain.pro, has received over the years, highlighting her success as a female founder in the fintech industry. She was featured as an influential woman in fintech in eWeek where she spoke about her journey as a woman in a male dominated industry. She was also named a female role model in the scaleup category by the SHE LEADS Dashboard. The women nominated for this distinction have (co-)founded companies in the Netherlands that have demonstrated strong growth in employees over the period between 2018 - 2021.
All of these programs and recognitions for female founders and women in technology, including the focus piece in the Dealroom report, are all in effort to highlight female successes as they navigate being a minority in such ventures. In an interview with Dealroom about female founders, Nicola notes, “Unfortunately, female founders are still a minority, especially in B2B (fin)tech. The stereotypical founder is a middle-aged white man. This means that as a female founder you are always 1-0 behind and need to work double as hard to gain the attention and trust of people.”
While the entrepreneurial journey can be exhausting and lonely at times – unfortunately even more so for female founders, Nicola offers advice to the women challenging the norm, saying “be your most loyal fan and celebrate your successes! No one will care as much about your company and take feedback as much to heart as you do. If you want to be in there for the long run, managing your own energy is key to a happy and healthy journey.”
Challenging the scaleup norm
When the founding team established Gain.pro, they didn’t believe in simply throwing money behind the business or following a “growth at all costs” approach – their goal was to create a global company with healthy unit economics and a clear path towards profitability.
This may have been viewed as a conservative approach to scaling a company by some, but a multi-million euro investment from an Angel investor allowed us to kickstart our growth journey, mindfully. To further boost our scaling efforts, we raised again in 2022 and received significant funding from the initial investors, the investment arm of a prominent European family office and the Gain.pro management team and employees. This investment has allowed us to further grow our business, both in terms of our coverage of private market assets and our technological functionalities.
Scaling our dataset
To expand our overall coverage of private market information and data, we’ve opened hubs in major cities across Europe and Asia, including Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Warsaw and Bangalore, forming teams of local-for-local analysts who focus on delivering the highest quality information and data on private market assets in their specific regions. We also now have teams dedicated to developing our USA coverage which will allow us to break into that new market in the near future.
Enhancing our technology
Our investment into innovation and new technology has also allowed us to scale our data coverage. As new developments in generative AI have been released, we have spearheaded its use in our private market intelligence, where we now use it to create automated company profiles with accurate business descriptions, completed in relatively no time at all. This provides Gain.pro users with even more information and data on the companies that matter to them most, without compromising on quality.
We have also integrated technology into our product functionalities where users, for example, can now use our AI to filter through data based on specific tags. This feature also allows them to discover other associated tags that could help either broaden or refine their search, giving them visibility on the entirety of their total addressable asset pool – which is essential in becoming a top performing PE.
As thought leaders in generative AI in private equity, we’ve been supporting investors, advisors and consultants in navigating the advancements in this field. We have held numerous conferences across Europe, speaking on the impact of ChatGPT in private equity and M&A, specifically addressing its use cases in portfolio companies and within firms. We have also hosted webinars and spoken at engagements to support the community in staying at the forefront of this technology.
As more and more advancements are made in generative AI, we will continue to leverage it to enhance our platform – both in terms of coverage and product offering. Our goal is to create the best private market intelligence platform on the market for our clients, which is why delighting our clients is at the core of our growth strategy.
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