Tessa Clarke
speaker
148 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Tessa Clarke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Within 23 minutes, they had been requested.
Extremely tough.
As I'm sure you can imagine, we were a female co-founded tech for good pre-revenue business.
We didn't exactly have investors lining up.
out the door to back us.
We have now raised five rounds of investment.
We've raised roughly $50 million.
And that has been very much against the odds, actually, because one of the things I learned pretty quickly through this fundraising process is how much the odds are stacked against you as not only a female-founded business, but also if you are a diverse founder of any nature.
Because I've spoken to a number of female founders who have tried to fundraise whilst pregnant and they have experienced enormous discrimination and other female founders who have been asked, what are your plans around family?
So we just wanted to take that off the table, given that we had both had our children and
Engagement rings, you know, you would remove as well.
You don't want any form of judgment either way on what your family sort of background might be.
And you need to think very carefully about the clothes you wear and how you show up because you do not want to reinforce those conscious and unconscious biases which say that you're not serious, you're not ambitious, you're not commercial.
It is depressing, but I think it is empowering because once you understand that the odds are stacked against you, you can come up with a game plan to counter that.
And nowadays, we are seeing more and more and more female founders, diverse founders, build their businesses, get to scale, exit, and they are now starting to invest.
And that is how we're going to see change actually take place.
So, we raised a large round of financing in 2021.
That's when the markets were very hot and lots of startups did the same.
And we used that money to finally bring in a C-suite of leaders, people who had worked and scaled up at Uber and Airbnb and Deliveroo and places such as that.
And that was a really kind of mixed experience.
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