‘How Women Invest’ Fund I Closes and Invests in Female-Founded and LED Companies: Gray Matter Analytics and Hitch

By AIT News Desk On Feb 17, 2021

Fund I Closes in Record Time, Invests in Tech Companies in the High-Growth Value-Based Healthcare and Future of Work Sectors

How Women Invest LLC (HWI) announced Fund I ($10M), oversubscribed and closed in just eight months, has invested in high-growth, female-founded and led startups Gray Matter Analytics and Hitch Works (Hitch). HWI portfolio companies benefit from the strategic support of a large limited partnership base and affiliation with How Women Lead’s vast network of professional, collaborative and community-driven women leaders representing board directors, C-suite, and senior executives.

How Women Invest provides capital, mentoring and a network of influential women leaders to support female startup founders, especially women of color. The HWI investment thesis includes initial investments of $250,000 – $750,000, with large reserves for follow-on rounds. The Fund is building a diverse portfolio of 10-12 companies that are tech-enabled, revenue-generating, and scalable in their central technology.

Erika Cramer, Managing Partner at How Women Invest, says, “The pace at which this Fund closed, within a pandemic, is a true sign of the demand and desire of accredited female investors to move the dial on funding female-founded businesses. Our investments in Gray Matter Analytics and Hitch are representative of the impact we seek from our portfolio companies in terms of building equitable systems whether it be in ensuring quality healthcare irrespective of demographics, or distribution of work according to skill versus role within large organizations.”

Julie Castro Abrams, Managing Partner at HWI and founder of sister organization How Women Lead, says, “Our Fund is a bright light in our country facing a crisis; 2 million women left the workforce in 2020 and accounted for each of the 140,000 lost jobs lost in December. We can turn the tide if we invest in women founders. Here’s how: new business startups explode in downturns and female-led companies hire up to six times as many women. We can create jobs and wealth for investors. According to Morgan Stanley, if VC’s invested equitably in women founded companies, they could have generated an additional $4.4Trillion for their LPs.”

HWI Portfolio Company: Gray Matter Analytics

Gray Matter Analytics was founded in 2013 to help healthcare providers and payors grow revenue, cut costs, and maximize quality with advanced analytics, ultimately empowering them to succeed in value-based care. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the industry’s underinvestment in data capabilities and accelerated its demand for practical, predictive analytics solutions and services. Gray Matter has filled that void. In 2020, the company signed or expanded 12 engagements with existing and new customers. Additionally, Gray Matter bolstered its product suite by adding two new offerings: Member Retention and Behavioral Health Analytics. With the support of How Women Invest, Cleveland Avenue Partners, and other investors, the company intends to grow its staff and revenue significantly in 2021, amplifying its capacity and dominance in the value-based care space.

“How Women Invest is creating a much higher profile for women of color who are often overlooked by capital investors in the tech industry,” said Sheila Talton, Founder, President and CEO of Gray Matter Analytics. “Our solutions provide predictive insights that not only identify systems inefficiencies for healthcare organizations, but also next best actions for intervention leading to improved outcomes and quality of care.”

HWI Portfolio Company: Hitch

More enterprise clients see the need to focus on their existing talent to boost productivity and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Hitch’s AI-powered platform uses analytics to identify internal skills supply and demand, improving productivity while supporting employee retention metrics and realizing cost savings. In addition to expanded capabilities around career and learning paths, Hitch’s 2021 initiatives include new functionalities that support adoption and talent mobility in globally-distributed enterprises with multiple and diverse lines of business. This best-in-class architecture will enable enterprise organizations to use one Talent Mobility Platform instance across many independent business units and allow talent mobility and resource sharing throughout the organization as the needs of the business evolve.

“As a former CHRO, one of my biggest pain points was balancing the need for high demand skills due to the pace of change and effects of automation, while meeting the need for improvements in employee productivity, performance and engagement. We created a talent mobility platform for the future of work that visualizes the skills across the enterprise and allows us to match the right people to the right work.” said Kelley Steven-Waiss, Founder and CEO of Hitch and co-author of The Inside Gig.

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