Redesigning the Field
Allocation Design and Early-Stage Capital for Women and Gender-Diverse Entrepreneurs
Despite substantial investments, women-led businesses still receive a disproportionately small share of total business financing compared to their male counterparts, highlighting persistent gaps in access to growth capital.
More inclusive allocation requires increased transparency and inclusive practices.
Exclusion is not produced only by who enters the pipeline. It is also produced by how opportunities are classified, compared, advanced, delayed, redirected, or declined once they enter investor and ecosystem processes.
For investors, this means treating sourcing, screening, governance, timing, and instrument choice as core operating decisions rather than background process. For ecosystem actors, it means making upstream filtering, support effects, and post-intake progression more visible. For policy actors, it means using market-shaping tools to reward process discipline, comparability, and learning across the allocation environment.
About us
New Power Labs (NPL) is an action-oriented think tank dedicated to expanding access to capital for underfunded and overlooked leaders and communities.
New Power Labs is a platform for leaders and organizations committed to advancing equity in capital flows across Canada. NPL works with foundations, investors, asset managers, credit unions and banks to help channel capital to historically underfunded and overlooked leaders and communities, unlocking the full potential of our country across diversities (gender, ethnicity, ability, neurodiversity, socioeconomic status, Indigenous identity, language minorities and others).
NPL is mobilizing funders, investors, lenders and asset managers in Canada to collectively move $500 million to under-resourced founders and groups by 2030. By challenging the conventional norms in philanthropy, investing, and across the capital spectrum,shifting policies and practices, system-wide change is possible.
The Women and Nonbinary (W) Impact (I) Network (N) for Venture Capital (VC) is a national collaborative of organizations working to provide services, programming, events, and dedicated resources to women and gender-diverse entrepreneurs and gender lens investors across Canada who are working towards becoming investment-ready and increasing the pool of investors driven to invest in these ventures. These organizations include: the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Esplanade, Pond-Deshpande Centre, Spring, SVX, and WeBC. This partnership is enabled through funding from the Government of Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), which supports initiatives that foster a more inclusive venture capital environment for women and gender-diverse founders.
