Ada Ventures becomes first VC firm in Europe to support founders with cost of childcare

Ada Ventures, the inclusive VC firm backing breakthrough ideas, is set to become the first investor in Europe to directly support founders in their portfolio with the cost of childcare. The new scheme, which launches this month, will see the firm cover the cost of up to 40 hours of ‘back-up’ childcare each year. It follows research which shows parents are forced to take 8 days off work each year due to childcare arrangements falling through.

Ada Ventures hopes the move will prompt other VCs to introduce better support structures for the parent founders in their portfolios, including childcare subsidy offerings and supporting founders with parental leave policies, helping level the playing field for entrepreneurs who are also parents.

Each founder in the Ada Ventures portfolio will be entitled to claim up to 40 hours of childcare each year. The offering will be delivered via Bubble, the UK’s leading on-demand childcare platform (and an Ada portfolio company). Ada Ventures has designed its offering to cover the gaps created by childcare arrangements falling through - such as through child sickness or nursery closures - alleviating an additional financial burden that can be particularly challenging for early-stage founders who happen to be parents.

The childcare allocation can be spent on any of the Bubble services, including verified babysitters, night nannies or holiday clubs.

Ada Ventures believe their new childcare offering will benefit the whole portfolio by helping to reduce an industry barrier which disproportionately affects women. The Treasury-led Rose Review of female entrepreneurship found that primary care responsibilities remain the most important barrier for many female entrepreneurs; with women twice as likely as men to cite family responsibilities as a barrier to starting a business.

According to a recent survey, 67% of mothers felt childcare duties in the past decade had cost them progress at work. During 2022, only 1% of VC capital was raised by women-only teams, with 87% going to all-male founding teams.

Check Warner, Co-Founding Partner at Ada Ventures, comments: “At Ada Ventures, we’re committed to removing barriers facing founders. We’ve worked hard to create a culture which champions diversity and creates a level playing field for entrepreneurs looking to raise capital and scale brilliant ideas into thriving businesses. We don’t believe being or becoming a parent should put founders at a disadvantage. In fact, we think it can offer founders a huge advantage - one that most investors overlook.

“This childcare offering is a crucial step forward in our commitment to being truly inclusive VCs who enable every founder to reach their full potential. We want to set an example about how a company can embrace parenthood by actively encouraging and supporting parents in our team, portfolio and wider community. We hope this motivates other investors to follow our lead and make a tangible commitment to support the parents in their portfolios.”

The scheme will initially operate as a two-year pilot, including a review after the first year to ensure the structure and offering is working for parents. The team at Ada will be gathering data throughout the pilot to measure the impact the scheme has on founders and their teams.

Ada will also be introducing firm-wide guidance for portfolio companies around parental leave; creating a roadmap to help founders design maternity and paternity policies that work for them and to foster positive conversations with investors around founder parental leave. The team at Ada believe all founders should be encouraged to take parental leave, with investors playing a core role in enabling and supporting this.

Inclusion is at the heart of Ada’s culture. 70% of Ada Portfolio companies have one underrepresented founder, with 49% having female founders and 43% having non-white founders, making their portfolio 15x more diverse than the average UK venture fund.

Ada also operates an Angels programme and Scout community to help connect them to a broad range of diverse founder talent. The firm’s Scouts sourced a quarter of the 28 companies invested in from the first fund, with 55% of those having female founders, and 30% being led by founders from ethnic minority groups.

Today’s announcement is the latest step from Ada towards introducing an even wider range of policies and practices designed to create an inclusive investing approach and infrastructure.