Female Invest: 3 Women, an App, and $11M Raised

Female Invest started with twenty women in a room and a problem nobody in finance wanted to solve. Today it's a women's finance app with 300+ lessons, a Sunday Times bestselling book, and an $11M Series A behind it. The three Danish founders, Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen, Emma Due Bitz, and Camilla Falkenberg, didn't chase a bigger following. They built a business their audience pays for every month. That distinction is the whole story. Most people in their position would have grown an Instagram account and sold a course. They built software instead. Key Takeaways:

Female Invest began as a ~20-person women's investing club in 2017 and scaled into a company by 2019
The Female Invest app holds a 4.8-star rating across 161 ratings, with 300+ lessons and a yearly membership priced at $299
The company raised a €10.3M (~$11M) Series A in July 2024, co-led by Educapital and Rubio Impact Ventures (EU-Startups)
Their book, "Girls Just Wanna Have Funds," became a Sunday Times bestseller (Penguin Random House, 2022)
All three founders made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list

What is Female Invest? Female Invest is a subscription-based financial education app and community for women, offering structured investing courses, webinars, a practice-trading simulator, and a paid membership, built by three founders who started with a small in-person investing club.

Who is behind Female Invest?

Three Danish women: Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen, Emma Due Bitz, and Camilla Falkenberg. They met the gender investment gap in the most direct way possible. They kept showing up to personal-finance events and kept noticing the same thing: almost no other women in the room. So in 2017 they started their own group. About twenty women, learning to invest together. Within a month it had outgrown the format. By 2019 it was a company. Hartvigsen has been blunt about why the gap exists. "Internationally, women are falling further behind when it comes to finance," she told Financial IT. "They are earning less, saving less and then, with what money they have, they are investing less." Her co-founder Emma Due Bitz put the cause plainly in the same interview: "The financial industry has traditionally been dominated by men. This is reflected in every aspect of it: from communication style to the corporate culture and product offerings." That's a sharp insight, and it's also a product spec. They weren't describing a content niche. They were describing an underserved market.

From a 20-woman club to a finance app

Here's the part most creators get wrong. Female Invest had an engaged audience early. Live events. A growing Instagram. A community that showed up. The easy move is to monetize attention: sell tickets, sell a PDF, run a course launch twice a year. They did sell a book. "Girls Just Wanna Have Funds: A Feminist's Guide to Investing" came out through DK / Penguin Random House in 2022 and hit the Sunday Times bestseller list. A book is great for reach. But a book sells once. The reader pays £16, finishes it, and the relationship ends. The app is the opposite. It's a women's finance app you pay for every year you keep learning. That single decision, recurring revenue over one-time sales, is the difference between a popular brand and a durable business. We broke the numbers down in App vs Course: The Revenue Math for Creators, and Female Invest is the live proof.

What does the Female Invest app actually do?

The app is the product, not a companion to it. Members get 300+ structured lessons that move from "what is a stock" to portfolio building, a practice-trading simulator called Playvest so users can learn without risking real money, live and recorded webinars, and a community of other women doing the same thing. The membership runs $299 per year with a 7-day free trial, and it's live on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. The rating tells you the experience holds up: 4.8 stars across 161 ratings at the time of writing.

Notice what the app does that a course can't. Every lesson a member completes is a reason to open it tomorrow. Every Playvest trade is engagement that doesn't depend on the founders posting. The product runs the relationship, which means the business keeps earning whether or not anyone is filming content that week. That's the same engine we mapped in From Content to Product: 6 Steps to a Subscription App.

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How big is the business?

In July 2024, Female Invest raised a €10.3M (roughly $11M) Series A co-led by Educapital and Rubio Impact Ventures, with the round positioning it as the largest finance app for women in Europe. Investors don't write checks that size for a content brand. They write them for software with recurring revenue and a clear market. The company also bought its way into deeper product. In late 2022 it acquired Gaia, a sustainability-focused trading platform, to extend from education toward actual investing (Fintech Global). That's a founder move, not a creator move. A creator grows an audience. A founder buys companies to serve customers better. Here's how the model stacks up against the way most audiences get monetized.

Stage	Format	Revenue Type	Ceiling
Instagram community	Free posts	None (attention)	Low
Live events	Ticketed	One-time	Medium
The book	Bestseller	One-time royalty	Medium
The app	$299/year membership	Recurring	High

Three of those four columns cap out. Only the app compounds. A reader who loved the book might buy the next one in three years. A member who loves the app pays again in twelve months, and the one after that.

A creator sells once. A founder gets paid monthly.

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Why building an app beats selling courses

Female Invest could have stayed a course business. Plenty of finance educators do, and some do well. But a course library is a content problem disguised as a product. You launch, you discount, you re-launch, and your income tracks your marketing calendar. An app changes the math three ways at once. It generates recurring revenue that grows whether the founders post or not. It pulls in new users through App Store search, people who never followed the Instagram and never bought the book. And it turns passive readers into daily users, which is the same flywheel that powers other knowledge creators like Kat Norton, whose Excel TikToks became a $1M business, and finance-adjacent operators like Codie Sanchez. The audience is the start. The product is the business.

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What creators can learn from Female Invest

Find the market under the niche. Female Invest didn't set out to make finance content. They named a market, women who'd been ignored by the financial industry, and built the product that market was missing. Sell the thing that compounds. The book got them reach. The app got them a Series A. If you have to choose what to build, build the one that bills again next year. Don't wait for permission or a perfect following. They started with twenty people in a room. The audience was a means, not the goal. You don't need five million followers to build something people pay for monthly. You need a real problem and the will to ship a product instead of another post.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Female Invest app?

Female Invest is a subscription financial education app for women. It includes 300+ investing lessons, a practice-trading simulator called Playvest, webinars, and a community, for $299 per year with a 7-day free trial. It's available on the Apple App Store and Google Play and holds a 4.8-star rating.

How much money has Female Invest raised?

Female Invest raised a €10.3M (about $11M) Series A in July 2024, co-led by Educapital and Rubio Impact Ventures. The round was reported as the largest for a finance app aimed at women in Europe.

Who founded Female Invest?

Three Danish founders: Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen, Emma Due Bitz, and Camilla Falkenberg. They started it in 2017 as a roughly 20-person women's investing club after noticing how few women attended finance events. All three made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list.

How much does it cost to build a creator app like this?

Most agencies charge $50K to $200K and take six to twelve months. Built by Foundry charges $0 upfront, ships in about three weeks, takes a revenue share, and runs the app for you forever. You approve the vision. We handle design, development, App Store submission, and ongoing updates. Want to turn your expertise into an app? Three women built a women's finance app from a 20-person club. Your audience already has a market hiding inside it. We build custom apps for creators, $0 upfront, three-week delivery, and we handle all the tech forever.