“I want people to walk into an investment committee and say, ‘My God, they were backed by Aurora’, and for that to mean something.”
That’s what Isabella Ghassemi-Smith, head of the newly launched Aurora Ventures, tells me when we discuss the new fund. She hopes that one day Aurora will carry as much weight with investment committees as Y Combinator or Sequoia.
She wants female founders to have a foot in the door before the conversation has even started — currently, women often have to prove their legitimacy before the meeting even begins.
It might sound like a lofty goal, but Aurora has the track record to back it up.
The investment program, which is launching today to back women founders from emerging markets, builds on four years of the Aurora Tech Award, which itself already exists as a mark of credibility for investors looking to invest in female founders.
The awards, backed by inDrive, have grown from just over 100 applications in 2021 to more than 3400 across 127 countries in 2025, and recognise the “boldest women tech founders”. Winners can secure up to $50,000 in non-dilutive funding alongside ongoing support. There are also shortlists and longlists that investors already consult when looking for founders. These lists span founders from Argentina to Algeria, from Panama to Peru, building tech companies across every vertical.
Ghassemi-Smith describes the new fund as a “natural development” for Aurora, which launched five years ago with the goal of sourcing and platforming opportunities that aren’t being seen yet.
“I want other people and existing capital that would have overlooked these founders to be like, ‘Oh, they've invested. We should too.’ Such a big piece of this is unlocking that downstream capital through a credibility piece,” Ghassemi-Smith says. “Because this is not a job that can be done alone. It's just a matter of connecting the dots that were frayed before.”
As she points out: “It's never been a talent problem. It's just an architectural problem.”
The funding gap in numbers
“Aurora is built for female founders, for the problems that they're solving, for the context that they're in,” she says. “Patient capital, more long term views on the businesses, understanding the problem statements that we're dealing with.”
This was particularly important to the team, she says, because venture capital, at its most basic level, is about sourcing deals and evaluating a pitch deck. This doesn’t always lend itself to founders from minority backgrounds.
You can spend your life trying to change a system that is struggling to move, or you can take things into your own hands and build your own status quo
The structural bias Ghassemi-Smith describes is reflected in Aurora’s own data.
According to Aurora research, of more than 900 female founders, almost a third (29%) reported facing a higher bar for traction than their male counterparts, with investors requiring them to provide stronger, more proven metrics to earn the same level of confidence. Meanwhile, 41% said they face persistent doubt about women’s ability to lead tech companies and scale ventures.
It is this funding gap that Aurora Ventures now wants to address directly.
Moving from awards to investment
Ride-hailing and delivery unicorn inDrive will back Aurora Ventures in 2026 as a pilot year, as it has done with the Tech Award. Next year, the program will then spin out to a full GP/LP fund.
Having seen a large gap in seed stage funding for women in emerging markets, the plan is to invest in five to seven companies at pre-seed and seed stage this year, with cheques ranging from $180-250k, though assets under management are not currently publicly disclosed.
Isabella Ghassemi-Smith, Head of Aurora Ventures
The team is currently in the process of determining investments and a lot of companies they’re looking at have come from the original award pipeline, notably “companies we’ve been able to see progress”, Ghassemi-Smith says.
Aurora is looking for “very capital efficient, high traction, high growth businesses” that are female-led with significant equity stake. While they are officially agnostic in terms of what sectors they’re looking to invest in, they’ve seen “a lot of good traction” in fintech in LatAm and in healthcare so far.
“We’re following where we’re seeing momentum,” Ghassemi-Smith says.
But Aurora can’t invest in every strong female-founded startup, and while it is evolving in terms of the launch of the fund, the Award isn’t going anywhere. In part because it isn’t enough for just one, or a handful of female-founder focused funds such as Female Founders Fund, BBG Ventures and The Helm to be investing in women, there needs to be a broader flow of capital.
But it’s far from being just about optics.
“Fundamentally, there's a massive opportunity here,” Ghassemi-Smith says. “It's very high performing talent with highly undervalued assets, that is just a good economic opportunity that we want to capitalise on, and we want to be early to the game.”
Building a pipeline
While the Tech Award has previously recognised its top three finalists, there are plans to evolve from a seasonal award to an ongoing structure, more akin to a Forbes 30 under 30, creating lists and top tens by region or vertical, helping to provide other investors with longlists of strong startups to back.
That credibility has also been built in public, and Aurora has found huge success through social media. If it seems familiar to you, maybe you’ve seen them take the idea of “If you don’t have a seat at the table, build your own table” to new depths, quite literally.
Online, Aurora has turned that philosophy into a recognisable brand language.
“If the table isn't built for you, you just have to build your own table,” Ghassemi-Smith says. “What that means is you can spend your life trying to change a system that is struggling to move, or you can take things into your own hands and build your own status quo. With Aurora we've had the absolute opportunity of doing that, of being like, we're not gonna push this. We're gonna build our own thesis of what good is. We want Aurora to mean something.”
