Chief, a network for women executives, hits unicorn status
“We were getting more senior in our careers and spending all of our time managing our teams, but no longer really had a community for ourselves,” Childers, former senior VP of operations at Handy (acquired by Angi), told PitchBook. “They say that it’s lonely at the top, but it gets lonely at the top a lot earlier for women.”
Today Chief unveiled a $100 million Series B round that values the 3-year-old startup at $1.1 billion. The investment was led by Capital G, Alphabet’s growth fund, and joined by returning backers including General Catalyst, GGV Capital and Inspired Capital.
Chief has over 12,000 senior executive members representing more than 8,500 companies, including Morgan Stanley, Accenture, LVMH, Zoom, L’Oréal, Universal, IBM and Twitter. And the network has a waitlist of over 60,000 women who are climbing the ranks in their organizations but in many cases not yet at the executive level, Kaplan, former VP of communications at Casper, said.
A Chief membership costs an average of $6,500 a year and offers each member a monthly small-group meeting with an executive coach and access to various workshops and networking opportunities, Childers said.
Women continue to be vastly underrepresented in business leadership roles. Companies founded solely by women raised only 2% of the total dollars invested in US VC-backed startups during 2021, a metric that has not moved much in recent years, according to PitchBook data.
Chief plans to use the fresh capital to build out its platform and make members’ experience more personalized.
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