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Rubio Impact Ventures backed Denmark and UK-based Female Invest to help close the gender wealth gap.
In Europe and North America, women will have amassed just 77% of the wealth of their male counterparts by retirement age. (Ratios vary country to country; Spain is the best performer and the Netherlands the worst in Western Europe.)
Female Invest provides investment training and financial literacy tools designed to help women catch up to their male counterparts, despite systemic imbalances, like the gender-pay and -care gap.
Rubio joined the company’s $11 million Series A round. Female Invest allocated $1 million of the round for its community members via a crowdfunding campaign; it closed the round four minutes after it was opened.
The equity investment will support the company’s expansion to the US and the UK.
Palm free
The Dutch impact investment firm also recently invested in Dutch startup No Palm Ingredients, which wants to reduce the food and cosmetics industries’ dependence on palm oil. Half of supermarket products include palm oil, a major culprit in global deforestation, in their ingredients list. The three-year-old company is fermenting agrifood waste in a lab into a palm oil alternative.
Rubio Impact joined the company’s €5 million seed round in July. Its investment will support the company with its demonstration-phase of production.
The two deals follow an investment in June in Prêts, a Dutch startup that is helping homeowners identify and price home energy upgrades.
