About 10 years ago, Kaylee Williams was walking in the Austin airport when she saw a banner advertising the HBO television show “Silicon Valley,” a comedy series parodying the tech industry culture in the Santa Clara Valley.
The poster featured five men wearing black turtlenecks. She posted a photo to social media, tagged HBO and asked a simple question:
“Where are the women?”
The startup company industry has long been male-dominated. In 2023, 13.2% of startup founders were women, down from 15.1% the prior year, according to Carta. PitchBook’s US venture capital founders dashboard shows female founders received just 2% of total venture capital funding in 2024, a figure that remains mostly unchanged since 2008.
Williams is a part of an Iowa cohort of female venture capital leaders hoping to improve parity in the industry.
Williams, Liz Keehner, Mikayla Mooney and Nicole Gunderson are a part of a surge in women leadership in venture capital in Iowa. All four women grew up in Iowa and received their undergraduate education in the state.
Now, all four are interested in showing other women — and founders in general — how the rate of innovation in Iowa can accelerate when more women are given a seat at the venture capital table.
“A rising tide floats all boats,” Keehner said.
Kaylee Williams, investment director, InnoVenture Iowa
Kaylee Williams was studying English at the University of Iowa with plans to become a writer when she stumbled upon the path that led her to venture capital. VolunteerLocal, a software-as-a-service business-to-business company managing volunteers, hired the Cedar Falls native as their first intern.
“I worked my way up to a community builder, then the director of business development, and then I became the CEO and president of that company,” she said. “We scaled that business. We never took on venture capital in the sense that we raise a true fundraising round, and actually it’s one of my biggest professional regrets.”
Her regret lies in the belief that they could have scaled the company to be much larger. While the company is still successfully run by her co-founders, she believes they could have been acquired and had a successful exit.
But Williams said she was too intimidated by the process to raise venture capital to take that next step in growth. She didn’t see women who looked like her in the field, something she says continues the cycle of women missing out on funding that could expedite their growth — and prevents innovative, disruptive technologies from making it to the market.
“When only 2% of venture capital funding goes to women-led startup companies, we all have to sleep well at night assuming that women-led companies only make up 2% of viable, scalable, extraordinary startup innovations, and I just know that’s not true,” she said. “I think the impact of not getting more money into the hands of female-founded teams is that we are leaving cash on the barrel.”
Williams joined InnoVenture Iowa in 2022. The company invests in biosciences, information technology and advanced manufacturing. They’ve invested 39% of their portfolio in women-led businesses, including Hummingbirds, the Des Moines-based influencer marketing platform that connects businesses with local social media influencers.
Williams and InnoVenture Iowa recently piloted a curriculum with Waukee Community School District’s APEX program to introduce more kids to the field of venture capital. She believes that when the path to become a decision-maker in venture capital is open to more types of people, especially women, the ecosystem in Iowa will become even stronger with diverse innovations and high-paying jobs.
“For women today, I do think it is harder to raise venture capital, even if you have a really good idea and team and a strong business model, because you still have to get the meetings and win over a venture capitalist. It’s very subjective, and it’s easy to allow stereotypes to come in,” Williams said. “Representation is a way to try and level the playing field.”
Liz Keehner, principal, Next Level Ventures
Liz Keehner believes getting more women involved in the innovation industry is a key step in building more economic power for women.
“If we can get more women angel investing and creating wealth, then they can invest in other women investors and founders. If we can get more money into the hands of women and founders and get them exiting their companies, that creates wealth for them and their family,” Keehner said. “It creates this flywheel effect.”
Keehner said there isn’t one typical pathway one needs to take to break into the venture capital ecosystem; they just need the courage to try. Her own journey began in Sheldon, where she grew up before attending the University of Northern Iowa. While in college, she watched a documentary called “Something Ventured” and knew the direction she wanted to take her career.
Instead of taking a finance or accounting internship, Keehner moved to Austin to join an early-stage equity crowdfunding startup. Her experience there learning the ins and outs of scaling a business from an operations standpoint, while also gaining valuable insight into investment processes, helps her understand the experiences of the founders she supports in her current position.
Keehner said when she joined AgVentures Alliance in 2020, she was the first woman to hold a leadership position in the Iowa venture capital ecosystem. She joined Next Level Ventures in 2022, leading its Midwest investment strategy.
“I think having a woman’s perspective when making investment decisions is very critical to the investment process. Eighty-five percent of purchasing decisions are made by women. A diversity of perspectives is helpful when making investments because you can challenge other people’s thoughts or bring questions to the table that weren’t there before,” she said.
Keehner said Next Level Ventures has invested over $65 million and helped create over 600 high-wage jobs in Iowa since 2014. She hopes all Iowans, but especially women, can overcome a fear of failure to help the state’s nascent startup ecosystem continue to grow.
“You look at places like San Francisco or Austin, the startup activity is dense, and failure is an acceptable thing. Failure is often rewarded and pushed for, honestly, because either you get to success or you get to failure, but get to them fast so then you can get on to the next thing,” she said.
The more women who are able to overcome that fear and pursue leadership roles, the stronger the entire ecosystem will become, Keehner said.
“There’s a lot of data out there that show that women, especially emerging managers, have strong track records compared to their male counterparts,” she said. “Oftentimes, we’re the ones who have to get out of our own way. When you have more women who are writing checks, you are getting more capital into the hands of women. And women tend to be better fiduciaries of capital with their startups then men, historically, and so I think that’s a great thing for venture when it’s an ROI business.”
Mikayla Mooney, partner, Ag Startup Engine
Mikayla Mooney developed an interest in food and agriculture while growing up in Ames and spending time on her grandparents’ farms. She studied global resource systems at Iowa State University and had the opportunity to travel to other countries and see how their farmers operated.
These experiences led her to co-founding KinoSol, a company building solar food dehydrators, with three other students. The company had products in over 50 countries and helped smallholder farmers around the world reduce food loss.
The company also showed Mooney the ins and outs of building and scaling a startup, valuable experience she brought to the world of venture capital.
“I learned a lot on that journey. I think it’s helpful having gone through that experience of ‘here’s how you build a product.’ I have great empathy for founders when going through that process,” she said.
Today, Mooney is a partner at Ag Startup Engine, which invests in companies solving problems in the agriculture industry. She sees her empathy for founders as one of the most important skills she brings to the job.
She hopes to help more founders see themselves as capable of raising capital.
“We bootstrapped everything at our startup,” she said. “A lot of the female founders that I talk to tend to bootstrap more. … They can go out and raise capital. I think women being on this side of the table helps change that perspective. I think back to my KinoSol days and we didn’t think going the venture route was even a viable option. I think we could have and it would have changed our trajectory.”
Mooney dedicates time regularly to talking with students about taking risks to get their ideas out in the world and pursuing venture capital to fund them. When she was in their shoes, she believed she needed experience with big corporations before pursuing her own dreams.
“I thought I needed to be this person that had completed college, had 10 years of experience working in the field before I could truly make an impact,” she said. “Through starting KinoSol, we attended this conference called “The Food for Thought Challenge” and it was all these really young people that were building solutions to solve challenges across the food value chain. And I thought, ‘I don’t have to be very far along in my career to do this.’”
Whether she’s learning from Ag Startup Engine’s investors, reviewing financials with founders or talking with the next generation of innovators, relationships remain key to how Mooney hopes to help businesses and farmers thrive in Iowa.
“Oftentimes, as women, we tend to be more relationship-driven,” she said. “Truly, venture is a game of relationships. Can you build relationships with founders? Can you build relationships with your [limited partners]? Can you build a relationship with other funds that could be co-investors? I think having that relationship driven mindset gives you a leg up.”
Nicole Gunderson, principal, ManchesterStory
Growing up the child of small business owners in Emmetsburg gave Nicole Gunderson the drive to join the world of entrepreneurs. She loved the idea of building something new.
This led her to the Des Moines-based financial technology company Dwolla, which she joined as an MBA intern in 2012. She made her own personal investment in another company at that time, too.
“I was really interested in entrepreneurs and how you fund these businesses,” she said. “I wanted to start to learn the mechanics of it. A very early investment in the company started my parallel path of understanding how to invest in these early-stage technology companies at the same time I was helping to build one.”
Gunderson grew to become an executive on Dwolla’s leadership team, ultimately leading sales and strategy for the company. She brought her experience helping to procure venture capital at Dwolla to the ManchesterStory team in 2022. Now, she’s able to offer her insight to founders as they navigate rapid growth in their companies.
ManchesterStory’s investment strategy attracted the innate leader in Gunderson. The company often leads investment rounds, setting the terms of the investment for other investors to follow.
It allows her to form deeper relationships with the founders her company works with.
“It means we’re doing a lot of work to understand the company and the stage that it’s at, its customers, its revenue, its traction. Then we’re able to appropriately put a valuation on the round of financing,” she said. “That was attractive to me because it meant we’re going really deep with the companies that we’re going to work with.”
Gunderson has often found herself as one of the few women in a room. She was one of two women in a room of 38 at an event earlier this month. Those experiences make the relationships she has with other women in venture capital even more valuable.
“I feel very fortunate. There’s other women around our community that are in pockets of what we’re doing. I look to those relationships, have regular coffees with some of them to just try to continue to have that network in our state. I’d love to continue to see that grow here,” she said.
Being a part of that growth is important to her. She regularly visits her alma mater to speak to students at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business to encourage students to break into the industry. She knows how intimidating her field can be.
“You need to see what you can be,” she said.
Whether it’s simply attracting companies to establish themselves in Iowa or encouraging young women to enter the finance and investment world, she appreciates any opportunity to show the strength of the innovation ecosystem here in Iowa.
“There’s a lot of strength here,” she said. “I would love to see more companies want to start here and build here because they know they can have access to capital here.”