In 2017, according to Forbes Magazine, only two percent of all venture capital funding for startup firms went to companies founded by women. And that number was an increase over the previous year, when just 1.9 percent of startup VC went to female-founded firms.
But as difficult as the landscape of entrepreneurship can be for women, in the business of sexually oriented tech companies, they face even greater obstacles. For example, many banks will simply refuse to do business with sex industry firms at all. That makes the success stories featured in a new Elite Business Magazine report published this week especially significant.
“The adult space has been very much a male arena,” Emma Sayle, founder of the SafeDate app and the sex-party community Killing Kittens, told the magazine. “The combination of women being a lot more in control and having our own voice, freedom and even the whole #MeToo campaign, everything just kind of merged [and] has opened up the sex industry as well.”
Even with a boom in women heading sex startups, financing is still extremely difficult to obtain, MysteryVibe founder Stephanie Alys said, noting that many of the VC investors who have fueled the technology industry still maintain struct policies against putting their cash into sex-related businesses.
“Raising money as a company with a crazy idea is always tricky but within this sector specifically, it’s [even harder],” Alys told Elite Business. “My understanding is that it all has to do with risk, both financial and reputational, which is crazy because sex sells, right?”
Alys, whose company makes, among other high-tech sex toys, vibrators that can be remotely controlled by a partner equipped with smartphone and app, also notes that cybersecurity is a major obstacle that sex-technology businesses must confront in order to let potential investors feel secure. In 2016, the We-Vibe 4 ’net-connected vibrator was infiltrated by hackers who were able to collect the most minute details of users’ sexual tendencies and behavior.
“There is nothing in this world that’s completely unhackable anymore,” Alys said. “My advice to all the companies within our space is to take cybersecurity as a top priority.”
The entrepreneur, whose four-year-old company now sells its erotic wares in 57 countries around the world, says that the future of the sex-tech industry may not lie solely in new gadgets and novelty items, and that the winners in erotic capitalism will be those who understand that sexual products must focus as much on emotional satisfaction as physical pleasure.
“We can get really obsessed with feature of products, gadgets and bits and bobs,” Alys said. “Ultimately, what matters to people is how that technology makes them feel, how it helps them explore their sexual health and be curious about that pleasure and how they can be more intimate with themselves and their partners. That’s the most important side of this industry to me.”
Photo by Informationstartupuk / Wikimedia Commons
