Two Alberta CEOs win thousands in investment at national pitch competition

Two Alberta CEOs have won thousands of dollars in investment through a national competition for women and gender-diverse entrepreneurs.

Shelvie Fernan from Edmonton and Lourdes Juan from Calgary are two of the winners of the 2022 HerStory pitch competition run by Alberta Innovates and The51, an organization that invests in startups and companies led by women and gender-diverse founders. 

The pitch competition, held in Banff earlier this month, featured 29 entrepreneurs from across the country sharing stories of how they came up with the ideas behind their companies.

Fernan is the CEO and co-founder of Fly & Fetch, a shipping company that aims to provide faster and cheaper international package deliveries. Fernan won $51,000 for the company through the HerStory competition.

"I was definitely shocked," Fernan said. "At the same time, you just have to claim it because I also work really hard and my team works really hard."

Rather than a traditional shipping process, Fly & Fetch pays travellers with extra space in their luggage to carry and deliver packages for clients. The company covers 50 to 100 per cent of flight costs for travellers, Fernan said, and it already has a database of about 7,000 travellers who are willing to deliver packages.

Fernan said the idea for the company came from her own experiences with international shipping. As an immigrant from the Philippines, whenever she sent packages back home to her mother through traditional courier companies, deliveries were expensive and usually took more than a week.

It's common practice in immigrant communities to ask people travelling back home to deliver packages for friends and family, Fernan said. 

"We've been doing this for so long," she said. "We need to have a business model that would work because a lot of other people want that [quick] shipment as well."

Shelley Kuipers, co-founder and co-CEO of The51, said the idea behind the HerStory competition was to re-imagine the pitch process in a way that serves women and gender-diverse entrepreneurs. 

"Don't pitch us, but tell us your story," Kuipers said. "Is there a lived experience behind this? Why are you the one to create this business? Why will this business be successful with you leading it?"

Kuipers said the competition is also meant to be a direct way to increase investment in companies led by women and gender-diverse founders. She knows first-hand how difficult navigating the venture ecosystem can be.

"My own lived experience was it was extremely challenging to raise capital as a woman entrepreneur and founder," said Kuipers. 

In 2020, female founders received just 2.3 per cent of the billions of dollars handed out in global venture capital funds.