Daya Ventures launches ‘community funding round’ to give women a larger stake in tech startups

Gothenburg, Sweden-based venture studio Daya Ventures, which builds and backs startups in women’s health, has launched a community funding round.

The round is open to non-professional investors and the ticket size starts at just €100. The closing target is €500k, with flexibility to expand beyond that.

It’s targeted at Daya Ventures’ 700-strong network of scientists, doctors, and engineers – most of whom are women – and allows them to become shareholders.

Malin Frithiofsson, founder and CEO of Daya Ventures, says the primary objective isn’t to raise capital for the studio, but to redistribute ownership and boost female representation in tech.

“Our community has been giving their time and expertise for free for years,” Frithiofsson tells Impact Loop. “We wanted them to have a real stake in what they helped build.”

Unlike a tradtional VC that invests in existing companies, Daya Ventures builds startups from scratch and then retains a founding equity stake in them.

To do that it taps a strong community of experts spanning everything from medicine to engineering who co-develop its femtech companies, often contributing their expertise pro bono. In this way, Frithiofsson says she hopes to create science-based solutions to “real problems.”

“The venture world spends too much time thinking about pleasing their investors, and too little time thinking about end-users and the issues they actually face,” she says.

Building women-led startups

Daya Ventures creates startups through a structured, two-stage process.

First, it runs a six-month venture creation phase, bringing together researchers, doctors, and other experts to identify problems, ideate solutions, and design prototypes.

Then comes a six-month acceleration phase, where it develops the product, creates go-to-market strategies, and recruits the best founders to lead the startups, spinning them out while retaining an equity stake.

The venture studio also runs a separate accelerator. Of the 16 startups that have come through the studio so far, half have been created internally while the other half have been funded through the accelerator. All are led by women.

The studio’s portfolio includes Omaia, a health app providing evidence-based emotional support during pregnancy and postpartum, and Juno, an AI-powered wearable that tracks vital signs in real time, enabling early detection of pregnancy-related risks such as preeclampsia.

Daya Ventures recently raised $200,000 as the first close of its ongoing funding round, which aims for a total of $800,000.

It’s a modest raise in a tight fundraising environment – and in an VC industry that disproportionately underfunds women-led founders and startups.

A report from the Founders Forum Group this year found that of the $289 billion in VC money invested globally in 2024, just 2.3% went to female-only founding teams ($6.7 billion). Just over 14% went to mixed-gender founding teams, while all-male teams took the lion’s share at 83.6%.