Amsterdam-based Joanna Invests, a new angel investment firm that helps women understand investing and women founders with funding, announced on Tuesday that it has made its first investment in Amsterdam-based We Are Eves, a platform for independent user-generated beauty product reviews.
The value of the funding has not been disclosed.
Joanna Invests was launched in December, 2021, in the Netherlands by founder Claire Tange, and was oversubscribed.
Tange adds, “I am super proud to have closed this first investment with the Joanna Invests community just months after launch. Joanna Invests is completely aligned with the mission of We Are Eves to make the cosmetics industry more honest and transparent via user-generated reviews of its members. I am really impressed by the drive and vision of the team to change this industry. The Joanna Invests Angel Collective is looking forward to being part of their expansion plans to the rest of Europe.”
About Joanna Invests
Amsterdam’s Joanna Invests unlocks funding to female-founded startups from female angel investors, providing financial support and expertise from woman to woman. The firm aims to lower the barriers to angel investing, making it easy and accessible to a wide group of women.
It offers investment opportunities in startups for a minimum of €2,500. The team at Joanna Invests focuses on funding early-stage female-founded companies in any sector.
The company’s founder, Claire Tange, has experience working with startups for over 8 years as CFO for Fastned and Dott. She is an active angel investor herself and wants to create a more equal and inclusive investment world. Tange says, “We are on a mission to reduce both the gender funding gap and the gender wealth gap by introducing more women to angel investing.”
Kirsten Tijssen, Senior Director Partnerships & New Commerce Nike EMEA, is one of the angel investors of the Joanna Invests Angel Collective. Tijssen says, “I have invested through Joanna Invests as it offers me the opportunity to be part of a funding round that normally would only be available for larger investors. Also, I didn’t have to spend time searching for the right startup, negotiating the deal, or worrying about the legal paperwork, as Joanna Invests takes care of this. I am very excited to support the female founders of We Are Eves.”
A beauty platform with real reviews of the beauty products
Founded in 2019 by Esther Leloux, We Are Eves claims to be the first beauty platform that provides real people reviewing beauty products that work or don’t work for them. Through its platform, the company aims to help women around the world find the right beauty products based on honest reviews.
The company says, “Our members help each other by posting their honest reviews and content about personal care products and tips they use. The most active members are selected for partner product testing rounds. In this way, Eves members get to test products of We Are Eves’s partners and share their honest experiences with the community. This also means negative experiences with products can also be found on We Are Eves, which is very different to social media on which you often only see enthusiastic (sponsored) posts. On We Are Eves, honest product reviews count and include both bad and good experiences.”
The platform has more than 70,000 members who have shared more than 180,000 product reviews that are being viewed over 1.5 million times in the Benelux. All global brands can be reviewed on the platform. We Are Eves believes that it is time for a new perspective on beauty as women are bombarded with marketing campaigns with fake images and empty beauty promises.
The platform is active in the Netherlands, Belgium and, since 2021, also in the UK, Germany and France.
01
Job board for modern workforce: How Remote Talent helps jobseekers find truly remote, distributed work