Iceland’s VC firm Crowberry Capital welcomes the Seattle startup GemmaQ as a portfolio company after leading the startup’s first funding round at $400K. The startup actually also has Nordic roots since it was founded by Freyja Thorarinsdottir who has been passionate about improving the gender balance in senior leadership in her home country, Iceland. GemmaQ has built a platform that rates companies based on gender diversity among their leadership. This enables users to see women’s real economic impact in the market and filter companies by their actions on diversity. The funding will accelerate the startup’s growth in the US market to create the opportunity for everyone to invest directly in women empowerment.
GEMMAQ’S FIRST ROUND WAS LED BY CROWBERRY CAPITAL
GemmaQ has closed its first round of funding at $400,000 led by Crowberry Capital, one of Europe’s largest female-led VC funds. The startup will scale into the US market from their Seattle offices – to meet the growing market for quality diversity data and technology solutions for better decision making and to drive impact.
GemmaQ provides the opportunity to invest directly in women empowerment, with quality real-time diversity data and a unique gender-lens platform. The exclusive factual data platform visualizes the real impact women have on global markets. GemmaQ was selected this year by the New York VC Network among top 10 ESG startups – and has been integrated into CSRHub, one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive ESG databases in the world.
Through GemmaQ’s platform, users can look at the Fortune 500 companies and the largest publicly traded companies in the Nordic markets through its gender-lens. Global spend on ESG data is estimated to increase from $2.2 billion in 2020, to $5 billion in 2025, according to research performed by UBS Investment Bank. GemmaQ will also be accessible via the AWS Data Exchange, which is meeting this growing demand and making it easy for millions of AWS customers, including investment professionals, corporate managers and consulting firms, to subscribe to and use third-party data.
The founder and CEO of GemmaQ is Freyja Thorarinsdottir (based in Seattle) and the CTO and lead engineer, Logi Bragason, joins GemmaQ after 16 years in software development for Bloomberg (IB, Commodities ET, Tradebook, Fixed Income, FX<GO>) in New York and London. Freyja was previously in the financial sector in the US and Iceland, prior to and following the collapse of the Icelandic banking system, including being a director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Iceland. Freyja was the winner of the Nordic Women in Tech Awards, Rising Star of the Year, Fall 2021.
GemmaQ was integrated and first made public on Keldan, the financial portal of Iceland, in 2019. Iceland, which has topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Equality Index for the past 12 years, has been a good test market for developing the product with its first customers.
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Originally published on ArcticStartup : Original article