Astia Angel Announces Founding Astia Angels

Research shows that both public and private companies with female executives outperform companies with all male executives.  Yet women entrepreneurs receive a small portion of angel and venture capital investment.  Astia Angel aims to generate above-market returns by investing in women-led, high-growth ventures.

"The fact that women entrepreneurs receive limited investment is both a problem and an opportunity," remarked Amy Gips, Founding Managing Partner, Astia Angel. "Astia Angel is uniquely positioned to help women entrepreneurs succeed while targeting an attractive return."

Astia Angel, an angel investor network that includes both female and male angel investors located globally, invests in women-led, high-growth ventures in technology, life science and consumer industries.  Astia Angel is a strategic partner of Astia, a fourteen year-old organization dedicated to the success of women-led, high-growth startups.

Astia is thrilled to have members of the community gather to provide investment in women-led companies,

commented Sharon Vosmek, CEO, Astia. "The community has always provided strategic differentiation for Astia companies. Direct investment is icing on the cake and takes community involvement to the next level."

Astia Angel is holding its first member meeting on January 24th in the Bay Area. Member meetings are held every other month and are hosted by DLA Piper.

Astia Angel is led by Founding Managing Partner, Amy Gips, as well as Founding Astia Angels, including experienced angel investors, serial entrepreneurs and top executives:

Roger Bamford – Roger is one of the earliest members of Oracle's database team and has been with Oracle since 1984. He has been the lead architect for Oracle's relational database management system since version 6 and is known as the founding father of Oracle Real Application Clusters.  Roger currently heads an advanced technology team working on semi-structured data and predictive analytics.  He has been an angel investor in numerous technology start-ups since the early 1990's and is currently a director for two of them.

Tiffany Bass Bukow – Tiffany is a serial entrepreneur and has founded companies in business acceleration, personal finance, health services, positive media, and internet consulting.  Her company MsMoney.com educated over ten million people about personal finance, her media company, Thrive Media, sold to Viacom and her Brazilian finance company won the Global Cartier Awards.  Tiffany is also a member of the Astia Global Advisory Board.

Karen Drexler – Karen has spent the last 15 years co-founding and building medical device companies, mainly in the diagnostics space.  Karen was President and CEO of Amira Medical, a glucose monitoring company that was sold to Roche in 2001 and is currently active with CellScape Corporation (Executive Chairperson, Co-Founder), Hygieria (Chairperson), and diaDexus (Board Member).

Wayne Goodrich – Wayne served as Executive Producer, reporting directly to Steve Jobs for over 20 years, in the Office of the CEO at Apple, Pixar Animation Studios, and NeXT Computer.  During his 17-year tenure at Apple, Wayne’s execution of over 100 product launch events honed his unique viewpoint on the intersection of launch marketing and consumer technology, forever redefining how business communicates with its audience.

Anula Jayasuriya MD, PhD – Anula is a life science venture capitalist and is the co–founder of the Evolvence India Life Science Fund. She is also an advisor and angel investor in life science and med tech companies in the US and a member of the Astia Board of Trustees.   She was previously a partner with Skyline Ventures in Palo Alto, and prior to that with the German-US venture capital firm TVM, in San Francisco.  Anula's prior positions include VP-Corporate development at Genomics Collaborative Inc., and Vice President, Global Drug Development at Hoffman-La Roche for opportunistic infections in AIDS and Transplantation.

Sharon Knight – Sharon is the Founder of Avik Ventures and is currently an active advisor to and independent investor in several early stage companies.  Most recently, Sharon was President of One Medical Group and previously was an executive at Electronic Arts and Gap.

Tim McClarren – Tim has been working on cutting-edge internet technologies for more than 25 years, including at Netscape Communications where he delivered versions 0.4 through 3.07 of Netscape Navigator. Tim was most recently Chief Technology Officer at Idle Games and has also worked at BEA, Nominum and Doppelganger.  Tim was a founding member of the Astia Global Technology Committee.  

Adam Quinton – Adam is an active investor, board member and advisor to early stage companies and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University.  He is also a member of the Astia Global Advisory Board.  Adam has 25 years of global investing and management experience and previously was a Managing Director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and head of Global Macro Research leading a team of 175 professionals in 12 countries.

Individuals interested in learning more about Astia Angel should contact Amy Gips, Founding Managing Partner, at amy[at[astia[dot]org.

Astia is a unique not-for-profit built on a community of experts with a distinct focus and mission: to propel women’s full participation as entrepreneurs and leaders in high-growth businesses, fueling innovation and driving economic growth. Astia works with women-led start-ups around the world (emphasizing companies in high-tech, clean-tech and life-sciences) to help them acquire essential business skills, access capital, dramatically grow their businesses, create networks and develop the executive leadership of the women on the founding teams.