Companies to Watch: Celebrating Female Founders in New York Tech

The tech sector has largely weathered the economic fallout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but challenges remain. Unemployment continues to impact women, especially women of color, the most as they are torn between their jobs and a disproportionate burden of childcare. Across industries, women have fallen out of the workforce at alarming rates and there are far too few safety nets to catch them and bring them back. This Women’s History Month, we are championing women who are disrupting the status quo, creating opportunity for all kinds of communities, and generally being badass. In New York, there’s quite a lot of them, if you haven’t noticed.

According to the latest data, New York ranks first among 50 major global cities in its support of women entrepreneurs — a quarter of NYC’s tech founders are women — and even a year into the pandemic, firms like BBG Ventures continue to commit new funds specifically for early-stage female founders. But there’s still more we can do to ensure women receive a more equal share of VC funding and other capital, as well as resources that maximize their long-term leadership and career goals.

For this month’s Companies to Watch, we spoke to four female founders about the tools they’re building, what it’s been like to build a company during a pandemic, and what more the tech sector can do to support a more diverse ecosystem of entrepreneurs.

ALULA

What does your company do?
Alula founder and CEO Liya Shuster-Bier: Alula is a radically honest resource making cancer less lonely. By centralizing the information patients and caregivers need to know (the kind that typically only exists in conversations between cancer-friends and scattered corners of the internet), Alula is translating the knowledge of others’ lived experiences into an unparalleled, radically honest place. We do this with a marketplace of recovery products curated by cancer patients and guided by the company’s advisory board of medical experts, communication tools that help patients and loved ones find the words to deliver difficult news and logistics tools that digitize all of the support needs of patients outside of the hospital room. 

Why did you found your company in NYC?
LSB: Quite simply, New York City is home and always will be. In 1989, when I was 15 months old, I emigrated from Baku to Brooklyn with my parents. Although I left the city a few times for educational and professional opportunities, my mom’s breast cancer diagnosis motivated me to return home in 2017 after graduating business school. Just six months later, I was diagnosed with a rare lymphatic cancer and Memorial Sloan Kettering became my second home. So many chapters of my recovery are punctuated by spaces and places in and around New York City, that it's difficult to want to feel as inspired anywhere else. Since I’m only two years in remission and my recovery care continues -- as I’m treated for medically-induced menopause, radiation fibrosis, lymphedema and other after-effects -- it’s important for me to live near my network of oncologists and healers.

Your career got started in finance and investment. What made you switch gears to found a company working on cancer?
LSB: My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer several months into my MBA at Wharton. At the time, I was taking a number of entrepreneurship courses, studying verticalized consumer businesses like Warby Parker and others. I wasn’t paying close attention to it at the time, but my mother was the initial inspiration for Alula. She was having trouble preparing for the after-effects of her first mastectomy surgery. She didn’t know which brands to trust, which products to buy and whether she would, in fact, need them. As we navigated through her recovery, we desperately wished we had certain products already, and were confused why the oncology team never gave us a shopping list.

Of course, it wasn’t their job to provide this shopping list nor the other hacks we discovered by living through treatment. Their job was to cure her of cancer. But, it left me wondering, whose job is this?

With my own diagnosis in 2018, I found myself as ill-prepared for treatment as my mother felt. It drove home the idea that people needed a modern resource to help deal with so many of the daily and drastic ways life changes from cancer. After several painful years of unwanted R&D, I founded Alula from my hospital bed, with the hope that it would help make cancer less lonely and easier to live with.

How did COVID-19 affect the launch of your company? What has been like building a company — much less a healthtech company — during a global pandemic?
LSB: I quit my job managing an impact investing fund in December 2019, ready to focus 2020 on Alula full-time. My 2020 started like everyone’s else: relatively normal and exhilarated about the possibilities ahead! I started a residency at Grand Central Tech, as part of their Founders-in-Residence program. I planned to raise a $1.5MM pre-seed by the entire of March so that I could focus on recruiting my team. I spent my January getting the investor deck and pitch ready. And started to meet with investors earnestly in February.

But by March 5, 2020, I decided to start taking all investor calls via Zoom. Within a week, memorably, the city officially shut down. And within two weeks of that, my husband started working the Covid shifts at Mount Sinai, the soon epicenter of the national crisis. Because of my fragile immune system, my oncologist urged me to move out of our apartment, so that Ben could safely come home after his shifts. I continued the fundraise from a friend’s place in Connecticut.

Ultimately, our pre-seed was oversubscribed. We closed on $2.2MM by late April. I went on to recruit my founding team from the guest room of my in-laws house in Massachusetts, living apart from my husband. I interviewed and on-boarded the entire team via Zoom interviews and have only met some of them during a photoshoot in November. 

We spent the autumn of 2020 working towards our target launch date of January 11, 2021, my 3rd cancerversary, the anniversary of my diagnosis. Now we are focused on building a deeper product experience, which has become more important than ever as 2021 will be the first year that cancer survival rates decrease because delayed cancer screenings and interrupted cancer treatment.

We hear about several health care solutions for people going through cancer diseases themselves, but why was it important to you that Alula also focus on cancer caregivers? 
LSB: Given my lived experience both as caregiver for my mother and as a patient that relied on my parents, siblings and husband for care, I know how crucial caregivers are for a patient's treatment experience and path to recovery. And I also know how underserved they are in the solutions that are out there today. That’s why their needs are equally as important for Alula as we design our product. Alula’s technology empowers caregivers and the broader support network to show up for the patient in a variety of ways and a variety of love languages. For those that may not have access to this kind of community support, Alula is developing targeted programs to help them process because we believe that no one should have to go through cancer alone.

The platform is providing “radically honest” resources about cancer. How are you also ensuring those resources are medically-vetted and responding to the latest science?
LSB: Alula’s marketplace of products is curated by cancer patients and caregivers and guided by our developing board of advisory medical experts, including a quilt of medical oncologists, integrative oncologists, survivorship experts, onco-nurses and social workers. It’s important to us to intertwine expertise across integrative medicine, survivorship, grief and bereavement, population health and psychosocial support, while honoring that the patient and their loved ones are accumulating important knowledge through their lived experience.

Now a year later, you’ve already raised your seed round, with Metrodora Ventures, BBG Ventures, and several others joining. What was that process like for you — and what more can the tech and venture capital communities be doing to make sure more female founders get the support they deserve?
LSB: Over the course of my pre-seed fundraise process, I met with over 80 investors across the country. In those many conversations, one common theme kept coming up: no one is untouched by cancer. It was important to me to take capital from investors who personally were touched by cancer, but I was stunned by how prevalent this was. Given that 1 in 4 Americans will get cancer in their lifetimes, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it always added a deep humanity to the fundraising process.

I am fortunate that many of my investors are incredibly committed to female founders. Chelsea Clinton, Susan Lyne, Andy Dunn, Edith Cooper, and others are personally invested in expanding the 2 percent of venture capital that female founders currently receive. One thing my investors do that I think cannot be understated is encouraging me to think bigger and bigger.

Okay, some rapid fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
LSB: Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint.

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
LSB: Blackseed Bagel in Bushwick.

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
LSB: Maialino in Gramercy Park (incredible happy hour specials!).

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
LSB: I’ve added “morning ritual” to my daily hand-written to-do list at work. I bullet out simple tasks, like shower, coffee pot, journal, 30-minute Peloton ride, breakfast, walk Chloe (my 18 month labradoodle), and I highlight what I complete just like the other buckets on my list. This keeps me accountable to my morning routine while my commute is from my bed to my dining room table.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
LSB: I introduced the concept of “breakfast of champions” on launch day. I gave each team member a stipend of $50 to order a celebratory breakfast — a purposefully silly amount to spend on breakfast — and asked everyone to post a picture of their receipt to our Slack channel. Growing up, my father would always cook me a big breakfast on my most significant days, and I wanted to bring that tradition to Alula.

What's one norm that was new to your team during the pandemic that you're definitely going to keep post-pandemic?
LSB: To help honor the boundaries between work and life, we’ve instituted “open” and “close” hours. We’re open 8am-7pm and we’re otherwise, “closed,” meaning that no meetings, work texts or emails are allowed to be sent after 7pm each evening. Everyone, me included, is required to “schedule & send” (my new pandemic-favorite feature in Gmail) emails for 8:01am the next morning. This has been our biggest investment in our mental health, our morning routines and our evening rest. We are definitely keeping this!

REALM

What does your company do?
Realm founder and CEO Liz Young: Realm is the first unbiased, centralized data hub for American homeowners. We help homeowners make informed home decisions — ranging from how much to spend on a renovation project to how to increase your home value.

Why did you found your company in NYC?
LY: We’re building a tool for consumers that is democratizing access to enterprise-quality real estate data. New York is the center of real estate in the US — the best talent and partners to build this business with are here.

You founded the company in 2019, and of course, at that time had no idea what was to come with COVID-19. Did the pandemic completely shift your expectations on real estate market trends? Did it impact Realm’s business model?
LY: Overall, COVID-19 has had a positive impact on our business. First, the home buying market has never been more competitive, with over half of homebuyers facing a bidding war. Homebuyers can use Zillow plus Realm together to find overlooked, high potential properties and avoid the bidding wars (see our blog post on how to do this!). Second, as people are spending more time in their homes and less on other discretionary expenses like eating out and travel, they’re spending more on home improvement than ever before (the annual spend has climbed to over $8,000/home). Homes have had to become gyms, offices, childcare centers. Homeowners can use Realm to prioritize home improvement projects based on what’s possible on their property, their goals, and their budget.

We hear a lot about how the millennial generation and those following aren’t buying homes — and might never meet the home ownership levels of generations preceding. How is Realm trying to reshape that financial picture — are their benefits to owning a home we aren’t paying enough attention to?
LY: Millennials are buying homes, but they’re waiting longer. Rising rents and home prices make it harder to save up for a downpayment. In 2020, 37 percent of homebuyers were millennials, but the majority of those buyers were older millennials. I love that millennials are more focused on experiences than material things, but buying a home isn’t like buying an expensive bag or piece of jewelry. For starters, it’s at the center of so many experiences and milestones — nights with friends, great meals, first dates, first kids. And second, it’s a way to get ahead financially.

For example, say you buy a home for $500,000 this year, you put 20 percent down, with current interest rates your monthly payment would be about $1,800. With a conservative appreciation estimate of 3 percent annually, your house will be worth $671,000 in ten years, and your mortgage balance will be $308,000. This gives you $363,000 of home equity — that would be enough for the down payment on an additional 1.8 million dollars of real estate or 15 years of in-state college tuition. If you were renting, that money would be in someone else’s pocket.

So, if I’m a homeowner who should be thinking more like an investor, what types of steps can Realm help me take to improve the value of my assets?
LY: The first step to thinking like an investor is being informed, the second step is prioritizing the highest ROI projects. If you make a free account with Realm, your dashboard will teach you about your property’s largest opportunities: its potential value, the total number of square feet you can build on your specific parcel, and how much of its potential you’ve tapped into (The Realm Score). The property plan will help you prioritize the projects that have the largest impact on home value.

What’s the one piece of data that real estate executives have access to that you wished the everyday homeowner could, too?
LY: Buildable square feet, the total number of square feet you can build on a parcel of land. Square feet is the single biggest driver of home value, so it’s critical to know this before buying a home or starting a large expansion project. Real estate professionals will leverage an analyst and land use attorney to figure this out, but the everyday homeowner had no ability to access this information (unless they were willing to do hours of research or spend thousands of dollars) until now — you can check out your “buildable square feet” on your free Realm dashboard.

You announced a seed round about a month ago. What was the fundraising process like for you? What more can the tech and venture capital communities be doing to make sure more female founders get the support they deserve?
LY: We raised in the middle of lockdown last summer, and overall had a positive fundraising experience. Not meeting investors in person or flying around the country let us run an efficient process: I talked to about 25 firms, got a number of term-sheets, and picked two amazing co-leads in under 30 days.

The biggest thing the tech and venture capital communities can do to support female founders is to invest in women before they’re starting businesses. Prior to Realm, I held executive roles at two startups where I was able to learn a lot and take on a ton of responsibility quickly. At times, I was the only woman and the youngest person on the executive team. Without the support of the CEOs I worked alongside and their investors, I wouldn’t have been able to get the deep operating and entrepreneurial experience that gave me the confidence to start Realm.

What’s on the horizon in 2021? Are there any projects you plan to prioritize, either because COVID-19 put them on the backburner or moved them to the frontburner?
LY: We already offer our insights to over 50 million homeowners, and are focused on making our insights even more personalized and accurate in 2021.

Okay, some rapid fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
LY: Joe’s Pizza on Carmine.

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
LY: For takeout: Ess-a-Bagel (everything bagel with scallion cream cheese). For dine in: Sadelle’s (with all the things: capers, red onions, etc.).

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
LY: The Grey Dog — hits both coffee and lunch, has lots of seating, and you can order at the counter to avoid the awkward “who’s paying” dance.

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
LY: Unscheduled Slack calls. I’m not sure if that’s a hack — but it’s the closest thing to tapping someone on the shoulder or live riffing.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
LY: We do a remote hangout every Thursday evening — our hangouts have ranged from HIIT classes to meditation guided by a Buddhist monk to cooking together.

What's one norm that was new to your team in 2020 that you're definitely going to keep post-pandemic?
LY: Respecting uninterrupted working time. In the office, it’s so easy to get distracted and pulled into things. Remotely, I’ve put an away message up on Slack and blocked my calendar for three or four hours many times. I get my best thinking done during those times.

STUF

What does your company do?
Stuf co-founder and CEO Katharine Lau: Stuf is reimagining storage for the modern user. We convert basements, garages, and other underutilized space in commercial buildings to bring storage closer to where people live and work. We take a tech-enabled and hospitality-driven approach to ensure our members, whether they’re individuals or small businesses, are taken care of and have easy, one-click access to their belongings.

Why did you found your company in NYC?
KL: I’ve lived in New York for 14 years. It’s my home, and I love the energy and creativity at every turn (yes, even during a pandemic). Now that we’ve proven remote work actually works, the concept of an HQ is less meaningful to me, so my team is already spread across the country. That being said, there are major business opportunities for us in New York as storage demand remains robust, and we continue to see that play out at our new Brooklyn location at 15 Vanderbilt Avenue.

In the — what, 15 days? — between the first news reports about how serious COVID-19 was and NYC going into full lockdown, a wave of New Yorkers made the jump to ride out the pandemic with family or in other places. All those people needed somewhere to store their stuff, right?
KL: Yes, we definitely saw that immediate migration out of the city. However, most people could not fathom the pandemic would extend into 2021 (I still can’t believe it sometimes), so we really saw the uptick in the summer when many leases came up for renewal with no end in sight for the virus.

Did you happen to found Stuf last year before we really knew what coronavirus was, or did the idea for the company come about because you thought the pandemic was going to drastically change how people live or move around?
KL: A little bit of both. For many years, I was obsessed with underutilized real estate — basements, garages, windowless office space, empty restaurants, you name it! There’s so much space that sits vacant and forgotten. It’s right under our noses, and frankly, it’s wasteful. My co-founders and I were already exploring this idea before March 2020, but as we were going into lockdown, I remember thinking, now is our time!

What are the storage facilities like? If I’m a New Yorker looking for a storage unit, what sort of unique experience is Stuf offering?
KL: Take a look at our Brooklyn location and tell me that’s not the most beautiful storage you’ve seen! Our spaces are welcoming and warmly lit to destigmatize what’s often a cold and uncomfortable experience. We’re experimenting with music and scents to see if our members respond well to those hotel-like touches. At our next few locations, we’re installing hooks for strollers, closet bars for e-commerce retailers, and other in-unit organizational amenities to gather user feedback.

In terms of technology, our mobile app serves as a digital key to get members in and out securely, without having to check in at a desk. We’re introducing photo inventorying so members can easily recall what they’ve stored. On the IoT front, our locations have security cameras and humidity sensors that are centrally monitored, and we’re having fun exploring new features and tools that will enhance our operations and member experience.

You announced a seed round at the end of 2020. What was the fundraising process like for you? What more can the tech and venture capital communities be doing to make sure more female founders get the support they deserve?
KL: I’m lucky that my co-founders are also VCs. We incubated the company together in 2020. Their experience and investor network helped tremendously in raising our seed round, so I have to say it wasn’t the typical experience.

Female partners are more than three times as likely to invest in startups with a woman CEO. We all know there aren’t enough women VC partners, period. And since we operate in an ecosystem, we must see more female representation among VCs so the capital and mentorship can elevate the female founder experience.

Fresh off that round, what’s on the horizon in 2021? Are there any projects you plan to prioritize, either because COVID-19 put them on the backburner or moved them to the frontburner?
KL: We’re focused on scaling our storage network while keeping our ★★★★★ member rating. Growth and quality often have an inverse relationship, so that’s a big priority for us in 2021. Additionally, I’d like to develop partnerships with moving companies and apartment buildings so we can offer our members a more seamless storage experience while supporting neighboring businesses.

Okay, some rapid fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
KL: Luigi’s Pizza in Brooklyn. It’s around the corner from my apartment and delicious. And Peppino’s is great for a whole pie!

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
KL: Best Bagel and Coffee on 35th St. Easy.

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
KL: I can’t wait to see people again. I love Daily Provisions for coffee and abcV for lunch (and I’m not even vegetarian).

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
KL: Time blocking. I started doing it earlier this year after picking it up from my leadership accelerator program. It’s made me a lot more focused and productive. Also, I learned stacking multiple boxes of Topo Chico could serve as a good standing desk.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
KL: Starting a company and building a team during a pandemic is tough, particularly when 99 percent of it happens via Zoom. During our 15 minute daily standups, I pose a question at the beginning to peel back the layers. For instance, when I asked “what was your favorite childhood snack?”, we learned one of our team members loved Uncrustables growing up and currently has a Costco-sized box of them in his refrigerator.

What's one norm that was new to your team in 2020 that you're definitely going to keep post-pandemic?
KL: Working remotely! We’ll introduce coordinated days for in-person meetings and collaboration. I still can’t believe that most of the team hasn’t met each other in person yet.

PRAxiS LABS

What does your company do?
Praxis Labs co-founder Heather Shen: Praxis Labs is changing the way organizations train and measure on diversity and inclusion through immersive learning experiences in virtual reality and actionable insights on our learning platform. Focused on impact, we’ve partnered with organizations like Uber, Google, Target, eBay, and others to help make workplaces — and ultimately society — more equitable. We are launching our flagship Pivotal Experiences training and invite companies interested in advancing inclusion and equity to reach out!

Why did you found your company in NYC?
HS: In many ways, it feels like NYC is a reflection of Praxis’ values: being brave, open-minded, generous, curious, and vocal. As one of the cultural capitals of the world, there are so many diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and identities that make NYC an amazing place to learn and work. As we grow our team (we’re hiring!), we’re excited to meet folks who have deep DEI and education research experience, as well as talented engineers skilled across different technologies — it feels like NYC can offer it all! We’re so excited to continue growing Praxis here.

What types of DEI training programs are companies typically using now, and why are those not enough? What does bringing VR in do differently that the more traditional programs can’t?
HS: When my co-founder Elise Smith and I started exploring using VR for DEI training, we spoke with over 150 Chief Diversity Officers and Heads of Learning & Development to better understand what they were using, and importantly, what they hoped for from DEI trainings. We heard that current solutions, including slide-based presentations or webinars, interactive role plays, or 1:1 coaching, could be more engaging, better at scaling, or could and should actually measure impact and efficacy. COVID and the switch to a fully distributed workforce only exacerbated these issues.

With our end-to-end learning solution, Praxis Labs combines the power of VR with powerful data and analytics to reimagine DEI training. We enable perspective-taking through our immersive experiences, and learners are able to build empathy by taking on a different background or identity, experiencing incidents of bias, and then practicing how they might respond to those incidents, either as themselves or as a bystander. We then serve up context and definitions on our Learning & Reflection Platform, where individual Learners and Admin can review and track progress in their learning journeys. We can be more engaging, more scalable, and more effective.

One dynamic we’re seeing in tech — and plenty of other industries — is that employees inside companies are speaking up and asking their own executives to make more commitments to equity and inclusion. What are some positive outcomes that Praxis Labs’ tools have helped bring about? Are there industry trends you hope to see more of?
HS: Part of our theory of change is that each individual and employee should be a leader; regardless of role within the organization, we all need to show up as conscious and inclusive leaders if we want to see change in our work cultures. In each learning module, we provide learners with research-backed strategies that lead to more inclusive or equitable outcomes and ask them to commit to practicing them every month. We follow up with recommendations on how to get started and track progress over time. Building empathy and conscious leadership muscles is not something that anyone can achieve from one 30-minute training — it has to be intentional and repeated practice. From here, we’re excited to see more and more individuals recognizing their active role in being conscious and inclusive leaders in the workforce.

You and Elise announced a seed round about a month ago. What was that process like for you? What more can the tech and venture capital communities be doing to make sure more female founders — particularly female founders of color — get the support they deserve?
HS: We are so thankful for the support and mentorship we received during our raise. One of the key pieces of advice that helped us think about our round and how to shape it was when someone pointed out that women, and especially women of color, tend to be under-capitalized because folks second-guess the amount to raise. I know I deal with “imposter syndrome” all the time and this was a reminder — one I’d also like to share with other female or BIPOC founders — that we do deserve to raise that much and it will help you and your company in the long run. Not every company fits a VC model but for those who do, don’t set your goals too low. We have big dreams, and sometimes capital can help us achieve them.

What’s on the horizon in 2021? Are there any projects you plan to prioritize, either because COVID-19 put them on the backburner or moved them to the frontburner?
HS: To be honest, we’ve been really busy! We’ve recently launched our flagship program, Pivotal Experiences, and are rolling it out to our launch partners through 2021. To meet the interest and demand for this product, we’re actively hiring and are excited to double the team in size! We are also planning to expand our curriculum offerings — what is so exciting about working closely with launch partners is that we are able to collaborate to determine the next training’s content.

Okay, some rapid fire questions. First: where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
HS: I’m partial to Scarr’s Pizza but to be honest, I love most iterations of bread, tomato, and cheese.

Where do you get your favorite bagel?
HS: Tompkins Square Bagels!

What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
HS: A bit of a non-answer, but I used to love taking walking meetings as opposed to coffee or lunch chats! Especially with spring coming, it’s such a good way to get outside and stretch while still catching up.

What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
HS: Did you know that research shows that selecting “Hide Self View” in Zoom can actually help with video chat fatigue? Literal life changer.

What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
HS: Like most teams, we do a weekly All Team but one thing that we started doing during it is a Question of the Day to kick off! We’ve had questions range from “If you were a talk show host, who would be your first guest?” to “Share a place where you feel the most creative.” We’ve been able to learn more about not just how folks work, but also what they value and what inspires them.