Poshly is one of five start-ups with a female CEO to be spotlighted by L’Oréal.
After founding an innovation fund last year and realizing they’d need to do some serious work to find the right digital start-ups with whom to work on the fund’s projects, L’Oréal held their first-ever NEXT Generation Awards to get to the right candidates.
The five winners, picked from a pool of 2200 candidates, were announced yesterday. All are women founders/CEOs of ingenious new digital tech companies:
- Doreen Bloch of Poshly
- Bettina Hein of Pixability
- Sarah McIlroy of FashionPlaytes
- Kathryn Minshew of The Daily Muse and CompanyMuse.com
- Vivian Rosenthal of GoldRun
No set deals between L’Oréal and any of the start-ups have been announced, but the cosmetics behemoth will most likely engage all of them on pilot projects, at the very least. Ultimately, L’Oréal’s initiative reflects a major new undertaking to create digital experiences by women, for women. In making that effort so public, they’ve managed to bring the attention of the venture capital community to women-led start-ups. This is no small feat, since as it stands, all of 1% of venture capital funding currently goes to new companies with a woman, or women, at the helm.
Beyond the fact that the beauty company will probably be launching some pretty cool digital initiatives, we think what L’Oréal is doing for female CEOs is incredibly commendable. We’re looking forward to tracking the first set of projects to come out of the NEXT Generation Awards.
