Female investors are scarce on the ground. According to Forbes, only a fifth of angel investors are women and AngelList has said that only nine percent of the registered investors on its website are women. Taking a look through AngelList confirms a decidedly lopsided list of men listed as investors, whether angel, seed or VC. It's worth highlighting some women in the DMV are standing out as investors. Here are some you should know:
Kelly Keenan Trumpbour - Trumpbour is an entrepreneur who founded See Jane Invest two years ago specifically to help women become entrepreneurs and investors. She's been heavily involved in pushing for women's involvement in business and politics on both a policy and individual level and is a board member of the Baltimore Angels investment group. She's invested in Allovue, an education analytics company that works to measure how education funding is linked to student success.
Maria Thomas - Thomas is best known as the former CEO of Etsy and is now CCO at SmartThings (recently acquired by Samsung). She is also currently an advisor for multiple startups including FlatWorld. She has invested in several startups including finance startup SideTour, payment validator SIGNIFYD and secondhand clothing e-commerce platform Twice, which was acquired by eBay earlier this year.
Elana Fine - Fine is currently the managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland and runs the Dingman Angels investor group. She's invested in around 20 companies according to AngelList, including several prominent local startups such as Brazen, Social Tables and Mememe.
Lily Bengfort - Bengfort is the founder and president of UAS Safeflight and has been on several technology and startup advisory boards in Maryland, including the UMBC Cybersecurity Advisory Board currently. She has invested in two edtech startups, education content platform CWIST and Unbound Concepts, which does for books for grades K-12 what Pandora does for music.
Valerie Gaydos- Gaydos is the founder of Capital Growth, which was one of the first central hubs for venture news. She's currently the director of the Accelerator for the Commercialization of Technology at the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship and the founder of the Angel Venture Forum in D.C. among other activities. She's been an investor and advisor for many companies over the years, including social aggregator Ampsy, solar energy marketplace Geostellar and mobile radio app FlyCast, which went public in 2012.
