WEFT Foundation Launches Womentastic App and Honours Women Entrepreneurs from Various Fields

Woman Entrepreneurs For Transformation (WEFT) Foundation - a not for profit organization formed to support and provide a networking platform for women; honored women achievers from different walks of life in Bangalore. The event felicitated female entrepreneurs as a way to celebrate women’s empowerment.

The winners comprise of -

• Somya Luhadia  - WEFT Young Achiever of the Year
• Sujyothi N Prasad - WEFT Woman for Woman Award 
• Pushpalatha MS  - WEFT Achiever of the Year
• Dr. Shreya Govind  - WEFT Consultant of the Year
• Gayathri Vamsi - WEFT in Business Excellence of the Year
• Swati Jha - WEFT Author of the Year
• Deepthi Babu - WEFT Innovative Woman Leader of the Year
• Anuja Soni - WEFT Artist of the Year
• Deepti Bhandari - WEFT Dreamer of the Year
• Dr. Samina F Zamindar - WEFT Women Leader of the Year
• Roopa Deshraj - WEFT in Design Excellence of the Year
• Shilpa Kulshrestha - WEFT Changemaker of the Year
• Rashmi V Kulkarni - WEFT Women Edupreneur of the Year
• Manjoo Shree. N - WEFT Transformational Leader of the Year
• SARGAM DHAWAN BHAYANA - WEFT Young Achiever of the Year (D2C) Category
• Swarna Raja  - WEFT Entrepreneur of the Year in Art and Culture
• Dimple Verma - WEFT Techpreneur of the Year
• Sudakshina Bhattacharya - WEFT Most Influential Women of the Year
• Priti Kabra - WEFT Emerging Author Wellness Trainer and Coach of the Year
• Smitha Arangaly - WEFT Homepreneur of th Year Award
• Aarti Notiyal - WEFT Woman in Public Relations of Year

The occasion was made more significant for all the women as WEFT launched its app ‘Womentastic’ - is a digital platform for women entrepreneurs to connect, network with each other, talk freely and opinionate and find solutions to their problems.

The fact that women entrepreneurs face numerous challenges in every field in different ways, thus WEFT Foundation began as an initiative to facilitate women with their entrepreneurial dreams. And the launch of the APP, is an extension and taking the efforts to another level by providing women a common platform to gain instant access and visibility. 

Womentastic - the app fulfils the fundamental need of women entrepreneurs – to reach and connect. Womentastic which has been founded by Iti Rawat, Sanjay Kaul, and Gaurav Raheja was received with an amazing response even before its launch and several women downloaded the App at the launch event itself. 

The event was attended by dignitaries like the App’s Founders, along with Rekha Sharma, Dipika Trehan, Aparna Vedapuri Singh, AlinaAlam, VandanaSuri, Anisha Singh.

Ms. Iti Rawat, Founder of Weft Foundation commented on the event and the Womentastic app, "It is been an overwhelmingto see the wonderful reponse at the successful launch of the event and the support from the community for the app. Womentastic is the result of our belief that women already have the innate capacity and skill to succeed as entrepreneurs, and giving them a digital platform like Womentastic will further enhance their entrepreneurial skills and facilitate mutual support among them. Networking is an essential aspect of being an entrepreneur, and our app makes it easier than ever. Imagine being able to acquire funding with a single click of a button, or finding legal, health, counseling at different levels and other help by just submitting your query to the relevant group. Womentastic has everything a woman entrepreneur might want, from careers to business opportunities, and more. Our motto is ‘stronger together', as we believe that women supporting each other is the best way to promote women’s empowerment.”

$1 Bn VC Fund for To Support 1000 Women-led/focused Startups

Ankita Vashishta, a venture capital investor, entrepreneur who is best known as founder of first women entrepreneurship VC funds - Saha Fund and StrongHer Ventures, is launching a $1 billion venture capital fund to support 1,000 women-led or women-focused start-ups in India and overseas in the next 5-years, reported The Hindu.

StrongHer Ventures has floated a $100 million venture fund for funding women startups. The VC firm will then launch another $350 million fund next year, while four more funds will be ready for launches in a phased manner thereafter.

The fund will invest in women-led or women-focussed startups in fintech, future of work, healthcare, consumer, and Web 3.0 that comprises crypto (NXT), metaverse, blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.

Citing Ankita, the report further said that the new funds will cover women entrepreneurs across Europe, Latin America, MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) regions - mostly untapped markets from where a lot of women are beginning to participate in businesses

In a statement to The Hindu, Ankita Vashistha, said -"We will be a billion-dollar venture fund platform in the next five years, the largest in the world for women. Our plan is to launch at least five more venture funds focused on diverse domains to support the growth of the female economy in multiple geographies."

Saha Fund has invested in women-led startups of varied domains including Fitternity - a fitness discovery and booking platform, which got acquired by Cure.fit; GoCoop - a global handloom/Handicraft online marketplace; Shoptimize and My Ally, which was acquired by HR tech company Phenom People.

Post the success of Saha Fund, StrongHer Ventures is the second global women-focused tech fund launched by Ankita Vashistha, investing in women led/focused technology companies. StrongHer focuses on pre-seed and early stage tech-driven companies in the areas of fintech, future of work, healthcare and consumer.

Vyaapar Jagat Fempreneur Conference and Awards – Celebrating Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav & Women Entrepreneurs of Aatma Nirbar Bharat

Running a business is no child’s play and being a woman business leader is an even tougher job. Vyapaar Jagat Fempreneur Conference and Awards Celebrating Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav & Women Entrepreneurs of Aatma Nirbar Bharat is an exclusive platform celebrating women who break the glass ceiling in being super women! Countdown begins in honor of Indian Women Entrepreneurs the edition of the Fampreneur Convention and Awards will be held in March every year. We are delighted to announce the launch of the Women Entrepreneurs Celebration of an extraordinary self-reliant India.

Vyapaar Jagat works with entrepreneurs and change makers, helping them tell their stories and build connections in the industry Vyaapar Jagat Fempreneur Conference and Awards – Celebrating Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav & Women Entrepreneurs of Aatma Nirbar Bharat aims to be the most prestigious honour that recognizes and celebrates the contribution of women in the mission of Aatma Nirbhar Bharat and Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav. With more than 2500 delegates, 40+ award categories to recognize women achievers and 100+ leaders, this conference and recognition ceremony promises to be most exciting event of the year.

Vyapaar Jagat Fempreneur Awards:

Fempreneur Conference & Awards gives an emphasis to give recognition to women entrepreneurs in different categories such as COVID Warrior - Food Provider Award, COVID Warrior - Shelter Provider Award, COVID Warrior - Resource Provider Award, COVID Warrior - Education Support Award, COVID Warrior - Medical Support Award, COVID Warrior - Counsellor Award, COVID Warrior – Rising Entrepreneur Award, Trend setter woman of the year (Individual & Organization), Young business woman of the year, Innovator of the year(Individual), Best Mompreneur of the Year (Individual), Best Angel Investor Award, Best Community service –Individual, Best Community service – Organization, Best Mentor Award, Best influencer Award, Innovator of the year(Organization), Creative entrepreneur of the year, Social Impact Creator Award, Green Business of The Year, Home Grown Business of The Year, Excellence in E-Commerce business Award, Excellence in Customer Experience Award, Excellence in use of Technology Award, Excellence in use of Government Scheme Award, Excellence in Apparel Business Award, Excellence in Beauty & Fashion business Award, Excellence in Health & Wellness business Award, Excellence in Tourism business Award, Serial Entrepreneur of The Year, Woman ahead Startup of the year

Founder of the year, CEO of the Year Award, Social Entrepreneurship Award, Business Leader of the year, Lifetime Achievement Award, Professional Entrepreneur of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year in Product or Manufacturing Business, Entrepreneur of the Year in Service Business, Entrepreneur of the Year in Trading Business and a few more.

The awardees will get to feature their brand story on VyapaarJagat.com & listing of their business on VyapaarJagat.com/Directory along with many more advantages such as a free PR package more than worth INR 100000 and amazing online brand presence. The awardees will be decided based on the decision of the judges as well as votes made by the public.

Award Nomination and Evaluation:

Feel free to help yourself filing a self-nomination form and submit it online. Any business organization /entrepreneur /allied sector can apply for one or multiple categories. Self- Nomination forms should be submitted along with the prescribed fee online. The nominees in each category will be presented to the final jury for determination of winners. For self nomination visit: https://fempreneur.in/awards/

VyapaarJagat.com works with entrepreneurs and game changers. We believe in the India story. We have one of the biggest economies in the world where is the top priority for all top businesses to set up their international branch in India. Foreigners taking advantage of the economic strength of our country but with the country’s initiatives of Aatma Nirbhar Bharat and Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav we are determined to give a larger platform for our inborn businesses. We help businesses tell their stories, so that people can believe in their dream and expand their business.

Vyapaar Jagat also aims in attracting likeminded people to partner and build connections in the industry. The Fempreneur Conference and Awards is the most prestigious honour that recognizes and celebrates the contribution of women in the mission of Aatma Nirbhar Bharat and Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav Every Year.

Visit following important links to participate:

• Self-Nomination for Awards: https://fempreneur.in/awards
• Become a Speaker/Share your Story: https://fempreneur.in/become-speaker/
• Become Event Supporting Partner: https://fempreneur.in/partner/
• Register to Attend: https://fempreneur.in/attend/
• Visit Website for more details: https://fempreneur.in

Contact Founder: Dr. Pravin Parmar at pravin@vyapaarjagat.com

 
For any queries regarding Fempreneur Conference & Awards (FCA), reach out on https://wa.me/919879933475

This Mompreneur is Offering Friendly Platform for Women with Infertility by Disrupting $775Mn IVF Market

At the age of 23 Gitanjali Banerjee got married to the man in Olive Green and from here her journey to unknown and unexplored began. As every other married girl Gitanjali next phase after marriage was the phase of being mother. But for her it turns into pain of 10 long and gruelling years of fighting infertility. Post 5 miscarriages, 3 molar pregnancies, 1 failed IVF, a brush with ovarian cancer; she finally succeeded on second IVF attempt.

I had a long and roller coaster journey towards motherhood. The pain and the social disdain that a woman undergoes during infertility journey is unimaginable and humiliating. Society, on the other hand has no idea about the pain of infertility and people end up hurting by passing shallow comments. It is startling that there is no neutral platform and especially no woman who comes up and says, “Yes, I have gone through it, I know it is not easy but got to keep going”. 1 in every 4 couple in India is fighting some or the other form of infertility. There was a need to come out of the infertility closet,” shares Gitanjali.

For Gitanjali her personal fear was the biggest challenge. But once, she overcame it and shared her story with people, it simply warmed up her which landed her into the land of entrepreneurship. She founded inFertility Dost to reach out to women who suffer in silence, bring real stories, make the society aware and acknowledge the pain, and most importantly to help patients find the right doctor.

“No, entrepreneurship was not in my mind but it became the need, a tool to reach out to millions of people who were sailing in the same boat like me. It became a tool for help others and thus social entrepreneurship project, inFertility Dost came happened to me,” says Gitanjali.

Bridging The Gap

It is believed that nearly 15% of the Indian population suffers from some form of infertility. Research in fact indicates that India has witnessed a 20-30% surge in infertility cases in the past 5 years. The volume of people affected by it sums up to be more than 150 million. Every year 10 million new cases are adding up in India. Gitanjali with her startup aims to cater this growing market. The target group for them including preventive healthcare of infertility stands at 460 million.



InfertilityDost, is an online platform that facilitates couples to brave infertility with support and knowledge. They hold hand, facilitate right guidance so that couples can take good decisions and stay away from misleading advertisements and fraud clinics, answer their queries by connecting them to experts, keep them motivated throughout this tough phase of life, reinforcing their strength and hope and enable them to fight with society’s stereotypes and prejudices.

“InfertilityDost fills the need to handhold a patient through the journey and bring everything under one portal to save time, cost and harassment. The social impact that we can create is huge leading empowerment of women. Also, the IVF market currently is unregulated, unorganized and not transparent. We aim to digitize atleast 10% of this market,” says Gitanjali.

InfertilityDost aims to build a complete ecosystem for infertility patients making support and knowledge accessible so that they can stay informed. There are many pain points in the journey of an infertility patients and InfertilityDost wishes to handhold at each stage, guide and provide services that can alleviate the ignorance and discomfort faced.

Currently, for Gitanjali the challenge is to find the right fit team where she is struggling.

Providing Emotional Connect

Startup is a patient-provider platform exclusively for the infertility and IVF patients. inFertilityDost provides handholding for patients with care, support, information and ancillary preparatory services.

“Our patient base is approx 5000. We conduct around 5 awareness campaigns and talks per month. We are focussed on building a community right now. We plan to leverage this power soon,” says Gitanjali.

Competing with startup like Practo, Gitajali says, “Though they are just listing and there is no emotional connect with patients. Our differentiation point is our community building, content and accessibility of all information in one portal.”

Future Plans:

Gitanjali believes that by using artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool can to do predictive analysis and serve the patients better in customized environment. Currently been incubated at IIT Delhi under their WEE program ( Women empowerment entrepreneurship), Gitanjali is looking to raise Rs 50 lakhs. Being India as their core focus, inFertilityDost get a lot of traffic from metros especially Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Delhi. Startup plans to expand its geographical reach to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities where treatment information is hardly available.

“Egg and sperm donation market is marred with irregularities that often lead to violation of government rules. Often, samples are passed without proper medical testing leading to occurrence of genetic and other problems in IVF children at a later stage. We aim to bring pre-tested and verified samples to the market. We will take this awareness among corporate to help them balance their biological clock and career better with options of freezing,” concludes Gitanjali.

Sector Overview:

Rise in the number of couples suffering from infertility, owing to urbanisation, pollution, stress, and lifestyle patterns has led to rapid growth of Indian market for IVF services. If we look at the figures stated by a report of Allied Market Research (AMR), IVF services market in India is projected to reach US$ 775.9 million by 2022, registering a CAGR of 16.6 percent from 2016 to 2022.

Further, owing to low service cost and availability of skilled workforce, India is becoming one of the preferred destination for medical tourism. Cost of IVF treatment for infertility in India is one-fourth as compared to the developed countries, as per the government of India’s Medical Tourism Department.

Not only this, clinics operating in the UK, Australia, Spain, Denmark, Israel, and France find it difficult to provide their patients with donor egg IVF services. Therefore, these patients approach India, where donor egg IVF is more convenient. There are several hospital chains like Apollo; Sun Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd; Cadila Healthcare Ltd; Trivector Origio Scientific; Lab IVF Asia Pte Ltd; LG Life Sciences;, Bourn Hall Clinic; Morpheus IVF Fertility Center; Cloudnine, a multi-city hospital chain for women and children specialising in obstetrics, gynaecology, fertility, and neonatology have come up to capitalise this untouched market.

Despite of all these encouraging factor, IVF market struggle to grow due to ethical and legal issues related to surrogacy. Apart from this, lack of established regulations and reimbursement policies leading to manipulative practices (such as sex identification and sex selection), also restrains the IVF market growth.

But mushrooming of startups like inFertilityDost has come as ray of hope of the IVF market. Now time will tell, how best these startups can capture Indian and market and provide people with sigh of relief.

Female Founders Helps Startups Grow Faster, and More Such Interesting Facts About Female Leadership

Businesses with female founders outperformed their male-only counterparts universally. This interesting finding came out about female founders in a recent report from TINYpulse. According to the report, “The fastest-growing companies that logged 200 per cent plus growth over the past year are 75 per cent more likely to have a female founder. In fact, in all but one growth category, companies founded by women outperformed those of their male-founded counterparts. TINYpulse has chosen 100+ startup founders and thousands of their employees for the findings of this survey. The report also revealed that transparency is another major driver of revenue and staff growth.

You can see in the below given image, how female-founded companies showed stronger growth.



Unfortunately the number of companies with female founders is very less. According to another recent report from Crunchbase, there are just 17 per cent of venture-backed companies in the 1^st quarter of 2017. Surprisingly, this percentage is same since 2012- just leaving 2015, when it was 16 per cent.

Some Other Interesting Insights from the same Report

Here is a quick review of some other interesting key findings from The 2017 Annual TINYpulse Start-up Report:

Having Multi Founders Does Not Impact Growth
There is a saying that “Too many Cooks Can Spoil the Broth”. It is true not just in case of cooking but in the businesses too. Having single founder is pretty cool, but according to the same report the companies with multi number of founders do not significantly impact growth rate. It is really overwhelming if your company has multiple founders as it help in a number of ways.



Startups who Prioritize Culture, Don’t Compromise on Talent Hiring
When startups look for culture fit talent, they do not compromise during hiring. Prioritizing culture also reduces unplanned attrition. Startups who rated the importance of culture the highest had lower unplanned attrition rates. However, maintaining employees and culture it is not easy for startups as ideal candidates are difficult to find out.



Transparency Empowers Startups
Another key finding is that company leaders typically felt their culture was performing better - in terms of transparency, valuing employees, etc. - than employees did. Startups often feel considerably more positive about their operation than does the rank and file.



Aah! All worth for me from all these findings is the “Companies Grow Faster with Female Founders” as it overpowers gender inequality. So, I would like to request all smart women to come together to nurture and support the startup ecosystem.

Click here for complete report

[Top Image - Shutterstock]