The movement for venture capitalists to adopt a gender strategy is growing in size and influence. In 2018, there were 87 private funds deploying capital with a gender lens, up from 58 the year before.

Here are seven stories of conversations that particularly impacted me, and which highlight the diversity and innovation happening in the gender-smart investing movement.

Six years ago, colleagues at the UK’s Department For International Development and the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect team came me to with their idea for what would become the SPRING Accelerator.

I started investing in women and girls in the early 2000s, after I successfully exited the company I helped to build. As an entrepreneur myself, I was familiar with the challenges women founders face.

In January, Wharton Social Impact Initiative and my firm, Catalyst at Large, released Project Sage 2.0, a global scan of 87 private equity, venture capital, and private debt funds that explicitly incorporate a gender lens in their investment strategy.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing with you what I believe are some of the most interesting themes to emerge from the study. (Read the previous article in this series here.)

In February, I travelled to Nairobi for the Sankalp Africa Summit, a gathering of social entrepreneurs and investors working to reshape the continent’s development landscape, where I led a discussion about investing to improve the lives of adolescent girls and young women for SPRING, where I've been Investment Director.

In January, Wharton Social Impact Initiative and my firm, Catalyst at Large, released Project Sage 2.0, a global scan of 87 private equity, venture capital, and private debt funds that incorporate a gender lens in their investment strategy.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sharing with you what I believe are some of the most interesting themes to emerge from the study, starting today with the way that new forms of diversity are showing up in investment criteria — or as I put it in the title of this piece, the rise of the intersectional venture fund. (The views expressed here are my own as Catalyst at Large, and not with my Wharton Social Impact Initiative hat.)

As a connector and catalyst in the gender finance space, I know that moving more capital, more strategically, in a gender-smart way requires not just influencing individuals and institutions, but shifting systems: of government, state finance, civil society, banking, shareholders, information, public discourse, and more.