Founder stories: Building a female-founded digital cancer care platform
We sat down with Kelly and Morgan to learn more about their experience as female founders building a VC-backed business, the challenges they have been facing and the learnings they made along the way.
What inspired you to start Perci Health?
Kelly: I worked in cancer care for a long time, both in the NHS and the private sector. There is usually really good care available when patients go through actual treatment, but once treatment ends patients are left to deal with a lot of long-term side effects themselves. It’s been documented for years that patients often feel a sense of “abandonment” when their treatment ends. With little to no access to healthcare support, people are left trying to navigate fragmented care systems, with long waiting lists and generalists, or dependant on support through the charity sector. This is where Perci Health comes in: we bridge the gap between cancer and both physical and emotional well-being.
Was being a founder something you always wanted to do?
Morgan: I always wanted to start my own business but felt I needed to build up my experience and skill set first. A more corporate environment was a good way for me to achieve that at the time. When I met Kelly, who had a great idea, I felt I was at the point in my career where I had the skills and expertise to bring the idea to life. Having worked in the corporate world for so many years I was looking for something more meaningful to apply my knowledge to - and what is more meaningful than helping people live more healthy and happy lives.
Kelly: I never particularly wanted to be a founder but I always wanted to be able to make a difference. Similar to Morgan, I needed a few years in a more corporate environment to build up the confidence and skills to start my own business.
You are both first-time founders. What are some of the major challenges you have seen yourself cope with so far?
Morgan: Being female, first-time entrepreneurs without our own independent or family wealth to fund the first stages of our business has definitely felt like a struggle at times, but it’s made us even more determined to challenge the status quo of how companies are run and to champion diversity throughout our own business.
Kelly: Funding a business is a complex, time-consuming exercise which takes a lot of time away from actually running your business. At Perci, we've adopted a team approach with additional input from key external advisors. That way we were able to relieve some of that burden and benefit from the different skills our team and partners bring to the table.
The number of female-founded businesses has continuously increased over the last couple of years. But female founders are still facing a bigger challenge when it comes to building their own companies. How has your experience been so far?
Kelly: Being female founders, we have certainly seen ourselves confronted with stereotypes when it comes to what women can achieve as entrepreneurs. While there is a general misconception that women are less successful when it comes to building and scaling a venture-backed business, being a mother puts you in an even more difficult situation. In the last 12 months, my co-founder Morgan, our chief commercial officer Nicole, and I have all had babies - and we still managed to secure our seed funding and moved from a pre-revenue stage to millions of contracted revenue. It's a juggle and requires support but it also teaches you to be incredibly efficient.
This is an interesting point you are making because the majority of VC funding goes to startups backed by male founders. Recent pitchbook data has shown that female-founded companies only received 0.9% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in Europe in 2022. Have you felt accepted and taken seriously when pitching to potential investors?
Morgan: It depends very much on the type of investor you are pitching to. We certainly felt a significant difference when talking to investors who have worked with successful women in the past and are displaying no bias. Looking back at our fundraising journey, there are unfortunately examples of being underestimated by some male investors. Nobody will say they won’t invest in your business because you are a female founder, but we could feel the undercurrent with the types of questions we were asked and the feedback we received.
Kelly: My husband runs a portfolio of different businesses and therefore has good experience with fundraising. If I compare the types of questions he’s been asked by investors to the ones we received, there is one clear observation: the risk focus for investors seems to be a lot higher with female founders. What if this doesn’t happen? How have you mitigated a specific risk? There seems to be less opportunity to sell the wider vision of your company which just changes the platform you are given.
It’s important to note though that there are incredible male investors out there. Once we found the right match for our business in terms of values and culture, it all became a lot easier.
What has been one of the biggest learnings on your founder journey so far?
Kelly: When you are a first-time founder, you don’t know what the “right” way looks like. Looking back, there were things wrong in the process but we didn’t know until we experienced the “right” process, it was just harder to see the red flags. When you are a pre-seed business that is not revenue-generating yet and you need funding for instance, it is harder to walk away from potential investors who are not a good fit for your business. After having found the right investor for us who is a perfect match in terms of our values and beliefs, we learned that we should have had the confidence to walk away from potential investors earlier in the process when things just didn’t feel right.
What piece of advice would you want to give other female founders or those thinking of starting their own business?
Morgan: Get qualified experts and advisors on board who can help you with strategically important aspects of your business where you lack the knowledge and experience. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure things out yourself but it’s time you don’t have as a founder. Relying on qualified experts and advisors makes things a lot easier and helps you make the right decisions for your business with confidence.
The other piece of advice would be: even if you want to have children, don’t let that stop you from starting your own company. We both had babies recently and it’s been hard - but it’s possible. But it’s all about having the right support in place: from daycare and support from friends and family to having a team and co-founder that understands these challenges.