Rainmakers Seminar: shaping the female funding landscape

Key industry leaders gathered at TheBusinessDesk.com’s Rainmakers Seminar to discuss the pressing challenge of becoming deal-ready for 2025.

Whilst political and economic stability is on the horizon, the corporate finance community is aware that the budget could significantly impact market demand, funding priorities, and regional growth opportunities.

But despite concerns about what could be introduced on October 30 by Rachel Reeves, resilient businesses are continuing to thrive, innovate and secure investment.

Among the influential voices speaking at Rainmakers was Melissa Snover, an award-winning health entrepreneur and founder of Rem3dy Health and Nourished. Recognised for her groundbreaking work in personalised health solutions, Snover shared insights from her entrepreneurial journey, including her experience raising significant funding and the vital role of innovative products in attracting investment.

Attendees also heard from Katie Trout, director of policy and partnerships at the West Midlands Growth Company (WMGC) who has been on a mission to attract investment, businesses, and visitors to the region.

Birmingham now has the biggest build-to-rent pipeline outside of London, with 9,000 homes under construction.

The region welcomed a record 145 million visitors in 2023, building on the platform of the Commonwealth Games, adding £16 billion to the regional economy.

It was also the UK’s leading destination for foreign direct investment outside London, with 133 projects generating 7,581 jobs.

Now the WMGC is calling on the corporate finance community, local authorities and Government, to create a combined approach to entice more businesses to the region, that will thrive and grow here.

Trout said: “The Global Growth Programme is a great example of a strategic management model, and we’re using it to attract international high-growth tech companies to the region.

“Working alongside Bruntwood and its consortium of Universities and innovation hubs, the programme is delivering a free package of UK market entry support to international companies locating to the region.

“This has helped land 35 international companies since it launched in 2021 we’ve got a target of a further 40 this year, with six due to land imminently – there are still more places to be allocated. If you know any businesses that might be interested in this, please do let us know.

“These programmes will only be successful through the engagement that we have with the business community, be that direct collaboration, or you being ambassadors for the region, both domestically and internationally”.

For the second keynote, Rainmakers welcomed award-winning health entrepreneur Melissa Snover, recent winner in the Department for Business and Trade’s (DBT) Venture Capital Unit’s inaugural Female Founders initiative.

Snover, founder of Rem3dy Health and Nourished, joined a cohort of 10 of the UK’s most promising female-led companies after DBT launched a national campaign.

A panel of VC judges scored each of the shortlisted companies, with only the most innovative products with great market potential, scalability and commercial viability making it into the first cohort of 10.

With more than 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, including multiple successful exits, Snover founded Rem3dy Health in 2019 and raised the highest-ever female founder seed round in UK history.

The Smethwick-based firm was recently honoured with the prestigious King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation, for its use of patented 3D printing technology and a unique vegan encapsulation formula. It has developed the world’s first FDA and FSA-approved 3D food printer which creates personalised gummy stacks under the brand Nourished.

The business has grown significantly, with more than 50m products made since 2020 and an 85% retention rate on its online model.

Women-led start-ups have been held back due to a lack of finance, with the proportion of equity capital investment going to all-female founder teams sitting at around 2% in the UK for the past decade.

In response to this disparity, the DBT’s Venture Capital Unit launched a national campaign to identify and support the UK’s 10 most promising tech female founders. Over the coming year, each will be offered opportunities to access the Venture Capital Unit’s global investor network.

Snover initially embarked on her fundraising journey and had “absolutely no idea” what she was doing. She had raised small amounts of money from friends and family and built her previous businesses to a sellable level, so began to listen to “every podcast on venture capital and funding”.

She said: “I’ve done all my rounds without an advisor and until this point, the seed round was relatively straightforward from access to people.

“What I think people don’t realise is with your seed round, I think it’s your hardest round because you are literally going in there with a slide deck and a smile!

“That is a big jump for people, as you unless you have a background where you can lean on your previous experience, which, luckily I did, I think it’s very difficult to get people to part with money”.

Once Rem3dy reached the point of raising Series A in 2021, Snover said the company had a lot of data, which added “a lot of credibility and trust to the business, which helped us to bring a huge number of people into the discussion and created a really competitive process. The Series A round was almost 200% oversubscribed”.

This allowed Rem3dy to bring in larger investors, as Snover secondaried out all of its seed round investors apart from two – who made a lot of money in a very short space of time. Firms such as London investor Kibis were brought in.

Snover said: “The total that I actually raised with the secondary was £16m, but we didn’t keep all that money, we only kept half of it.

“Since then, we have not raised a price round, but we did raise a safe round in between in order to open up the ability to make an investment outside of a price round to investors that came to us that wanted to come in right away, such as Suntory Holdings and UPSA, which is a pharma company in France”.

This money was also raised online and from Birmingham, which Snover says was not difficult and she didn’t meet a single investor face to face.

“You absolutely can raise money from anywhere in the world, for anywhere in the world”.

As Snover set out on her entrepreneurial journey, she said she was warned against CVCs as they’ll “ruin your growth, they’ll push you into a different trajectory, it will stop you from getting the maximum value for stakeholders on exit”.

She now says: “I cannot disagree more. When the whole world blew up in venture capital, guess who still had money? Guess who still looked at businesses in a different way. It was the best thing that I ever did”.

One big piece of advice to entrepreneurs from Snover was to “buy the best legal advice you can afford, because it’s one of those things which is really costly. When you’re a new entrepreneur and every penny counts, it’s very difficult to make sense of the fees, but the mistakes it could save you are huge”.