Clearbanc Co-Founder: Using A.I. 'Takes Out the Gender Bias' When Funding Entrepreneurs

When it comes to where venture capital dollars are spent, it’s perhaps unsurprising that nearly 98% go to companies backed by men. But Clearbanc co-founder and president Michele Romanow is changing that average by doing things a little differently—by leveraging artificial intelligence and data.

A serial entrepreneur herself, the Canadian co-founder has started (and sold) many companies, earning her a spot on CBC’s hit show Dragon’s Den—the Canadian equivalent of Shark Tank—where Romanow first got the idea for Clearbanc.

Following a particular pitch for a wood iPhone case company, the entrepreneur said at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in Toronto on Tuesday that she wanted to do things a bit differently—by funding companies, but not taking any equity from them.

“That became effectively what was the first Clearbanc deal,” Romanow said of the wooden iPhone case deal. And since then, Clearbanc, a venture capital firm specializing in non-dilutive funding agreements with startups, has used an innovative method to help fund what will be 2,000 companies by the end of 2019 to the tune of $1 billion in investment.

Previously, entrepreneurs could go to banks and provide personal assets as collateral, or go to equity investors to determine if their company was worth the investment—what Romanow calls “the catch-all for basically not having data that was easy enough to understand or that was in an automated stream that A.I. could look at.” But instead, Clearbanc uses what they coin the “20-minute term sheet,” which cuts down the typical six to eight weeks spent trying to get a single term sheet down to around 20 minutes to make a deal, Romanow estimates.

By using new data sources taken directly from companies’ bank accounts, payment processors, Facebook ad accounts, and ecommerce accounts, Clearbanc determines worthy investments through A.I. and automation. And that creates one big positive—”it takes out the gender bias,” Romanow says.

“The other nice part about looking at data is that you get rid of your bias— we’ve funded eight times more women, and I mean this very sincerely, not by doing anything at the top of the funnel,” the Clearbanc co-founder said.

Compared to the industry average of funding about 2% female-backed companies, Clearbanc funds anywhere between 16-20%, according to Romanow.

By taking the individual out of the equation when analyzing startups, Clearbanc is making way for female entrepreneurs to shine—and, to boot, is “looking at data that is far more accurate,” says Romanow.

Clearbanc Co-Founder: Using A.I. ‘Takes Out the Gender Bias’ When Funding Entrepreneurs

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