WeWork Labs in partnership with StrongHer Ventures set to empower 1 million women through 'Arise’
Arise is an acceleration program that serves as one of the largest platforms for women-led entrepreneurship in India. It offers knowledge sessions, bootcamps, engaged mentorship, hiring drives, and many more benefits more to participants.
Leading flexible workspace provider, India, announced their partnership with StrongHer Ventures to launch Arise. A program that is geared towards fostering the women entrepreneurial ecosystem in India, it will be led by WeWork Labs and StrongHer Ventures.
The former is the global incubation and acceleration wing of WeWork while the latter is India and the world's first woman-focused VC. The strategic partnership for Arise provides competitive guidance, business support, and community development to women entrepreneurs. This is done through a mix of knowledge sessions, bootcamps, networking sessions, and access to follow on capital.
Arise makes use of StrongHer Venture's investment expertise and WeWork's global acceleration platform. The program is set to mentor 1,000 entrepreneurs and engage with 5,000 startups. An additional aim is to invest in over 100 startups through the course of the next five years. With this, it is expected that over a million women in India will be engaged and empowered, which will fuel a 5x increase in funding for women entrepreneurs. The expectation is that there will be reduction in pay gap, and Arise is looking at adding $1.5 billion to the women-led economy in India.
Head of Labs at WeWork India, Arvind Radhakrishnan, said, “WeWork Labs has always been uniquely capable of delivering ground-up impact because of WeWork India’s extensive physical presence across the country. This allows us to have our eyes on the ground in several micro-ecosystems, and engage with founders on a much deeper level. We are delighted to partner with StrongHer Ventures to leverage this access and reach to address the perennial issue of underrepresentation of women in the startup ecosystem."
"With StrongHer’s extensive track record and network, the aim of the partnership is to build a solid foundation for women-led and focused businesses in India and offer a combination of capital, acceleration, mentorship, customer and market access to high-potential women-led or women-focused startups going forward.”
To facilitate Arise's vision and mission forward, WeWork will be providing access to their spaces at highly subsidised rates through WeWork Labs’ Growth Campus offering.
Founder & Managing Partner at StrongHer Ventures, Ankita Vashistha, said,
“We are founders of the first venture capital fund to invest in women entrepreneurs, and with Arise, we are now launching the largest accelerator platform for women led and focused startups, along with WeWork Labs in India. We are engaging women leaders, investors, founders, professionals and corporates to build the most engaged community and ecosystem for women.”
The program will be drawing out the entire women led innovation ecosystem in India, which includes notable names like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (), Kirthiga Reddy (), Upasana Taku (), amongst others.
The acceleration program will be open to all pre-Seed women-led and women-focused startups in several categories such as health, fintech, consumer, and more. Arise will have a keen focus on engaging with startups in the various rounds of fundraising. This is in order to help them scale their businesses, and encourage long-term societal impact.
Edited by Anju Narayanan