On International Women’s Day, Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) is proud to be a founding partner of LSX Female Founders.

This year’s International Women’s Day is all about ‘breaking the bias’ and LSX Female Founders is doing just that by building a strong community of women pursuing careers in the health and life sciences industry in which to date women have been underrepresented.

LSX Female Founders was founded to connect women entrepreneurs in the health and life science field with investors as well as to offer mentorship from relevant industry professionals. Together with our fellow founding partners Life Sci Advisors, LabCorp and Halloran, we can offer a combined network of over 10,000 investors to support the progression of new businesses.

In just a short period of time since its inception, LSX Female Founders has already organised upcoming panel discussions and clinics to provide knowledge sharing and networking opportunities for women entrepreneurs.  Over the next couple of months, my colleague Anne Horgan and I are looking forward to sharing our insights and experience at the LSX World Congress, Female Founders advisory panel and upcoming clinics.  

At CIC, we’re committed to supporting diversity within the industry. Our most recent ESG initiatives emphasise our own targets in advancing equality and inclusion within CIC, particularly through recruitment where we consider gender and ethnic diversity on all shortlisted positions. As a company we also hope to see our ESG ambitions impact the industry more broadly – that’s why as our portfolio companies grow, they are encouraged to set their own diversity targets and participate in annual demographic reporting.  Now through LSX Female Founders we are pleased to have the opportunity to make a greater impact on diversity in the industry at a much larger scale.

The truth is, we will be better investors and build better businesses if we embed diversity at our core and ensure women are well represented within the sector. Some of the most successful life sciences businesses are led by women, such as Dame Emma Walmsley at GlaxoSmithKline. The industry will lose out if we don’t encourage more women into the field and support their progression.

Within our small team at CIC, we are lucky to have a role model in our female partner, Anne, who has emphasised that:

“There is no future for our industry without women. It is vital that we continue to grow an ecosystem in which both female and male entrepreneurs can thrive, ensuring access to the most innovative minds that Life Sciences have to offer.”