The Rise Of Women Investors Turning $30 Trillion Into Female Ambition

Larina Chen-Mehta leads investment syndicates primarily drawing from high net worth women who want to support women founders.

Andrea Flanagan Photography

At a women investors’ event in Los Angeles, someone asked Catherine Drummond Lake why she invested in startups. “To make money,” she said.

The room looked at her strangely. She found that strange. One would think this room, filled with founders, funders, and operators gathered to talk about capital, wouldn’t shrink from ambition. But her answering a money question with a money answer shifted something. A woman being unapologetically capitalist is still treated as an anomaly.

As Women’s History Month draws to its close, the discourse surrounding female empowerment often devolves into a predictable loop of “leaning in” and celebrating the statistical climb of women on boards. Panels convene, statistics circulate, pledges are made, but what happens the other eleven months is a different story.

Women control $10 trillion in U.S. investable assets, growing to $30 trillion within the decade as generational wealth transfers. Yet Pitchbook shows women-led funds get less than 15% of venture capital. The gap between money women hold and money they deploy suggests investing happens to women, not by them. The women in this third of my ongoing investor series prove otherwise, strategically channeling capital to underrepresented founders who look and talk like them.

Catherine Drummond Lake, CDL Ventures: The Quiet Angel Among Women Investors

“I’m a woman in Alabama that wants to support female founders,” Lake told me via Zoom. “I don’t really advertise what I do. I’m kind of a behind-the-radar girl.”

Before becoming an angel investor, she was a Merrill Lynch wealth manager who left because she hated talking to people about their personal finance. She had a baby during COVID, taking the motherhood hiatus before going full time into travel planning as a side hustle. Two years in, she told a friend she missed using her finance brain. He reminded her she had capital set aside and loved supporting women. Do it, he advised. “What a man answer,” Lake said. “Like, how easy was that?”

She wrote her first check in 2023 to Nicer Travel, a tech platform building a CRM for travel agents to solve a problem she understood well. This launched CDL Ventures, a firm that still has no business cards or website, running discreetly in Birmingham as a one-woman shop. She’s since made nine investments, almost all in female-founded companies: Nicer Travel, Zant (Gen Z mental health), Croux (gig economy staffing), Juliet Wine, Poppy Seed Health, Moxie (childcare), ShopCouper, and one SPV investment in Lemon Perfect. Industry agnostic, Lake’s investment thesis is simpler than any deck. “You’re investing more in the founder. And drive, and belief in their idea.”

Lake first heard Maggie Rose pitch Zant at a Los Angeles investor event. “That was one of the best elevator pitches I’ve ever had.” What sealed it came when Rose traveled to meet Lake and her daughter at a New York City playground on a cold, windy day simply to spend time together. “The fact that someone took that time to just hang out with me and my family on a playground.”

Before Rose was Croux founder Jennifer Ryan, who’d been Lake’s spin instructor years earlier. She watched Ryan speak at a Birmingham venture capital luncheon to a room full of men and watched those men lean in, thinking to herself, “I know her. I’m going to invest in her company.”

Her check sizes range from $10,000 to $125,000. “I haven’t made a dollar, I haven’t lost a dollar yet. I’ve invested in nine, and I think I’ll get to 10, and then stop. And let them ride out and see which ones make it and which ones don’t.” She knows not all of them will. “If they do, fantastic. CDL Ventures will have a website.”

Larina Chen-Mehta, LWC Ventures: The Consumer-Fluent Syndicate Leader For Women Investors

“To invest is such an emotional thing,” Larina Chen-Mehta, angel investor and principal of LWC Ventures, told me over Zoom. “It changes on a day-to-day basis. ‘Oh my god, no more, I need to hit pause’ and then you come across something that really excites you, and you’re like, ‘I want to be a part of this.’ You’re invested not only monetarily, but emotionally as well.”

Chen-Mehta’s two-decade PR background is central to her investment thesis. She began in consumer PR, working across lifestyle, hospitality, restaurants and hotels to now use that background to shape how she reads founders. Beyond listening for growth projections and category buzz, she’s also observing whether the brand knows who it is, who it serves and how it should be understood. For her consumer-focused thesis, founders must know how a product lives or dies in its customers’ hands before she writes a check. A founder is immediately disqualified if the brand mission still needs to be reworked after fundraising has begun.

“You need to be very, very clear in the beginning,” she said, “because if you’re going back to rework your branding and your narrative, that just means you need to work on some other things besides that. That’s your best foot forward. That’s the first impression. So if you don’t even have that dialed in — not attractive for me.”

She saw the alternative play out with a wine company she tried to help with internal structure, launch planning, brand voice, and narrative. The founder refused to engage with any of it. “They just did not want to listen. It was just, ‘this is what we’re doing.’ And sure enough, every time, it was a failure.”

Investors who lack proximity to the end user often outsource judgment, asking friends or family whether a product “makes sense.” This is a quiet but consequential failure in diligence Chen-Mehta eliminates for investors inside her investment syndicates. “I am the due diligence.” Her trusted sharp instincts make it possible for her to secure additional capital for founders who need more than the $10,000 to $50,000 checks she typically writes.

Her syndicate deals have included Halfdays, a women’s skiwear brand founded by two women, one a former Olympian; Camilla Gabrieli, an Italian luxury shoe brand whose founder trained at Vivienne Westwood and Halston before bootstrapping her launch; and Chicago-based Boka Restaurant Group, one of the country’s top five restaurant operators, for whom she’s working on a $15 million capital raise for a Denver launch.

With investor appetite typically stronger for tech than consumer companies, she explains to investors it’s not what a company makes, but how clearly it can explain why it exists, whether the product can become part of someone’s life, and if the founder can translate that promise into something repeatable. A strong product can get attention but only a clear narrative builds trust.

“Just because you’re in a store, you’re in a boutique, somebody’s distributing you, doesn’t mean your item is going to sell,” Chen-Mehta said. “It can’t go on a shelf and just sell itself. You still have to educate the consumers who are shopping and seeing your product for the first time.”

Margaret Hines, Navi: The Institutional Insider Among Women Investors

“There’s a lot of shortsightedness in venture capital,” Margaret Hines, investor and co-founder of Navi, told me. “If they don’t know you and you’re not an exited founder, they’re not going to take the time to learn about it, get to know you, and see the capacity and capability in you, especially if you’re a woman. They’re lazy. They’re not critical thinkers.”

Hines spent fifteen years inside Silicon Valley’s most pedigreed funds as Chief of Staff to Richard Blum at Blum Capital; investor relations manager at CMEA Capital; Vantage Point Venture Partners, where she worked on Tesla’s earliest rounds; and BlackRock Barclays Global.

“I was turning millionaires into billionaires, and my husband was saving lives and helping people heal,” Hines recalled. “I decided to resign from my venture capital partnership and travel with my husband for a year.”

She built Navi, a clinician-led, AI-free mental health app for teens aged 13 to 18, after watching her husband speak to 200,000 kids annually about suicide prevention and realizing the infrastructure those kids needed after he left the stage didn’t exist. Every other mental health app uses AI because it’s cheaper but Navi doesn’t. “I don’t want a death of a child on my head. I’d rather not make billions of dollars than have even one death.”

Despite her enviable black book, she couldn’t get funded pre-revenue. Six VCs told her to come back when she reached $1 million. Hines invested her own money instead and became revenue positive in the first year. Navi now has multi-million-dollar government contracts with New York and New Mexico states. The six VCs came back.

“No, I don’t want your money now,” Hines told them. “You think I’m going to dilute and give you equity and a huge, huge potential, huge opportunity for you when you weren’t there to help us when we needed it? Now you want our money? You want shares in our company? You think I’m just going to say yes? And of course, mostly men. So, you know, the answer is no.”

Hines continues to invest through Cherub, the founder-investor platform she backed the moment its founder called, and through her family office. She writes checks across defense and behavioral health with no mandate save one.

“I will always listen to a pitch for behavioral health. But when I have a female founder pitch me, I really pay attention, because I know what the numbers are like for female founders. It’s not enough. Women account for 80% of consumers. So why do we have a lot less power than men in terms of capital?”

Nhi Le, Alpha Intelligence Capital: How Women Investors Are Reshaping Deep Tech

“Science is fundamentally taxpayer-funded research that oftentimes is published for other scientists to publish upon,” Nhi Le, partner at Alpha Intelligence Capital, told me. “And very few of the scientists that we have take this research that is taxpayer-funded and figure out how to make it so that it’s useful within our lifetime.”

Dr. Le is a Vietnamese refugee whose family arrived in Atlanta with nothing but the immigrant drive to succeed. A Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation scholarship sent her to University of Wisconsin-Madison for a PhD in bioengineering after completing her undergraduate engineering degree at Georgia Tech. At UW-Madison, she helped her advisor start a company commercializing their stem cell research, which was then patented by WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the oldest university-based technology transfer office in the world. That was her first lesson in what private capital does.

“Private capital, true private capital, venture-driven, returns-driven capital, is one of the most unique ways that you could take a very risky bet,” Le said. “But also align that risky bet with incentives that would push researchers to figure out a way to take research that is usually in the lab and figure out how to monetize it in a way that actually gives taxpayers back the value of their money.”

From WARF she moved to a Singapore family office investing in deep tech university spinouts, where she built and ran the fund before joining deep-tech AI firm Alpha Intelligence Capital. Women in deep tech investing are rare; women arriving in this space through a PhD bench, a tech transfer office, and a Singapore family office are essentially singular. Le’s path provides a competitive advantage above her peers as she reads a founding team’s science the way Chen-Mehta reads a brand story.

“We are soon to see an uptick in VC firms hiring highly technical founders who’ve either started a company and failed or started a company and exited — both equally valuable — and PhDs,” Le predicted. “The next wave of venture investing that is very sustainable, very lucrative, is in science and engineering. You can’t do it if you don’t know it, because you can’t do the diligence on it, and you can’t build the rapport with the founders.”

For promising opportunities, she added, investors are the ones soliciting. “Usually, people say the founders are asking the investors for money, but at the same time, for a great deal, the investors are begging to be able to invest. You can’t get allocation into a round if you can’t build rapport, and it’s very hard to build rapport if you can’t speak the science with the founders.”

The C-Suite Takeaways For Attracting Women Investors

These four women represent a pivot in how value is calculated in high-friction environments, proving traditional finance credentials are secondary to judgment. For CMOs working alongside the C-suite to prepare founders for a capital raise, here are takeaways to account for in your pitch.

• Narrative is Infrastructure: As Chen-Mehta’s stress test proves, a product is merely inventory until it has an unshakeable narrative. C-suite leaders must ensure their brand mission is dialed in before seeking capital. If the story needs reworking during the raise, you aren’t prepared for the market.
• Character Over Credentials: Credentials predict technical ability, but scars from past failures and coachability predict survival. The most successful investments are often found by observing how a founder commands a room or handles a pivot more than how they present a spreadsheet.
• The Technical Rapport Advantage: In deep-tech and clinical sectors, “dumb money” is increasingly unwelcome. As Le noted, the best deals often see investors soliciting founders. Allocation in these rounds goes to those who speak the science as well as the numbers, making technical fluency a necessary currency.
• Due Diligence Runs Both Ways: When your company is working, you’ll have choices. Hines’ refusal to take money from the six VCs who passed pre-revenue is a reminder founders should evaluate investors with the same rigor. The relationship you build before the check matters as much as the check itself. Investors who weren’t present when you needed them shouldn’t expect the same terms as those who were.

All four investors bet on the person, not the pitch. This calculated risk is based on the relationship before the ask and a demonstrated capacity to execute under pressure. How you communicate, how you take direction, whether you show up on a cold playground when you don’t have to — these are signals investors are reading. These women investors aren’t interested in investing as a mechanical function of wealth; they respond instead to value-driven purpose. They want their capital to act as a catalyst for a future where $30 trillion in assets is transformed into ecosystems of female ambition.