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By Sheila Marikar

Female entrepreneurs have long known how difficult it is to raise money from a room full of men. “I’d like to walk into these rooms in the late 40s, early 50s dudes – potential investors – and they’d just look at me blankly like, ‘I’m not getting it,’ ” said Rachel Drory, founder of Daily Harvest, a delivery service for produce-oriented meals. “Sometimes they would say,” Can you send samples to my wife?”

What if Ms. Drori, and others like her, could step into a room full of women?

On a chilly evening in January, about 275 entrepreneurs filed into the SOHO Outpost wing, a women-only joint club, for women-only pitch night. They grabbed seats (pink folding chairs, mint settees, maroon sofas) as well as sustenance (crudit’s, cheese, wine) before the main event: Ten startups will present their business proposals to potential investors as well as those interested in learning from or working with them.

The gathering was called Wingable, named after the club and Able Partners, a new York venture capital firm that had already invested in each of the 10 companies. The Fund, which was founded three years ago by Lisa Blau and Amanda Eilean, has been an early-stage investor in a number of women-based companies, including wing and Goop.

Prior to the event, startups spent six weeks in the Able incubator program honing their business models and pitch decks. “We call it the anti -‘ Shark tank ‘because everyone is already a winner,” Ms. Blau said. “They’re getting funding from Able and we’re just trying to get more female investors on their spreadsheet.”

Among the attendees was Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe and most recently Glamsquad, who said she had discussed investments with two of the winged startups. “I know a lot of women come with their checkbooks open,” she said, surveying the crowd.

According to the venture capital website Crunchbase, as of October 2017, women made up just 8 percent of investment partners in the top 100 venture capital firms. And last year, female founders received only 2.2 percent of the $ 130 billion in venture capital money invested in the U.S., according to the Analytics firm PitchBook and the advocacy organization All Raise. That works out to a total of $ 2.9 billion; for a sense of the scale of money going to other startups, one, Juul – which makes fruit-flavored e-cigarette cartridges-recently attracted a $ 12.8 billion investment from Altria.

“Guys will never do events like this,” Ms. Roberts said. “And the food will suck, and it won’t be so well organized, and ego: You might have to leave, you’ll have to go outside and get a breath of fresh air. We don’t have to play Golf or poker to get together and do business.”

“There’s nothing like being a pregnant woman in the tech world to make you feel like an alien,” Ms. Eilean said.

Ms. Blau and Ms. Eilean declined to name the size of their Fund, but said their portfolio includes 38 companies, investments starting at $50,000. Twenty percent of startups have men on their Executive teams.

Able is not the only recently formed investment fund targeting women. In 2015, Arlan Hamilton, a once homeless music manager, created Backstage Capital, a $36 million venture capital fund dedicated to “underestimated founders” — women, people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community. In 2014, Anu Duggal started Female Founders Fund, which she now runs with Sutian Dong, a venture capital fund that invests solely in women-founded start-ups. It’s a small world with a lot of overlap: Ms. Blau gave Female Founders Fund one of its first checks, and several of the companies that participated in Wingable have had conversations with Backstage Capital and Female Founders Fund.

Last fall, Ms. Blau and Ms. Eilean sketched out an idea that would lead to a Wingable pitch night in January. In October, they called on interested startups, clarifying that they must have at least one founder who identified as a woman, and had to be in the pre-launch stage, with less than $ 5 million in revenue.

Within two weeks, Ms. Blau and Ms. Eilean filed more than 800 applications. They hired two graduate students to comb through them and recruited Ms. Eilean’s sister, Sarah Godwin, who until recently worked at mit, to develop an evaluation matrix for the most promising candidates.

By November, Able had selected 10 startups; the Fund ended up investing a total of $ 700,000 in the group in some degree of fairness. During a six-week “boot camp,” Ms. Eilean and Ms. Blau gave women access to their network of investors and advisers; put them through media training; paired with mentors, including Ms. Wilkis Wilson, SoulCycle chief Executive, Melanie Whelan, and Away co-founder Jen Rubio; and spent “office hours” to zhuzh their PowerPoint pitch deck.

The day before the wing demonstration, the group gathered at West Bourne, a vegetarian cafe in SOHO, to practice their presentations. A projector was installed next to the extensive distribution of purple cauliflower and other crudit’s.

When Zofia Moreno, founder of probiotic drink Both, stumbled across her lines halfway through her script, BEA Arthur, who started an on-demand therapy called Difference, shouted: “You’re doing great, it’s good!”

Others practiced hitting lines and sound bites designed for Twitter. “Our equipment is not barbells and treadmills; it’s wine and Kleenex,” said Shannon Mclay, 40, who started a chain of financial coaching centers called the Financial gym.

Other companies included BlockFi, which provides banking services for cryptocurrency investors, and AcadeMe, a platform that teaches women job skills like how to negotiate higher wages. The only men in the room were the kitchen staff and a guy named Evan who kept his head down and pressed slides on a laptop connected to a projector.

Over a lunch of Kale salad, bowls and sweet potato tips, participants talked about working with male investors. “This investor once told me,’ I’m too good to be accused of harassment, ‘” says Viveka Hulyalkar, 26, co-founder of charity Beam.

“I don’t even care about harassment,” said Ms. Arthur, 35. “It’s just like, if you’re not going to invest, then you’re just wasting your time and trying to hit me on top of it.”

In February, city hall announced that it would invest $ 30 million in women-led startups through a program called WE Venture, in coordination with private venture companies that have a track record in the area. Alicia Glen, the Deputy mayor in charge of the initiative, said she would ask Able to provide advice on deals and women entrepreneurs worth watching.

“You don’t want any smart woman or any good idea to fall through the cracks simply because it doesn’t work for a particular Fund Manager,” MS Glen said. “Lisa probably gets smashed a lot of things that aren’t ready for her, but great for us. If we get smashed by some Wellness cannabis thing that you put on your body and it makes you tall and skinny, well, they should go work with Lisa. I’m a middle-aged bureaucrat; I have no idea what things are.”

On the wing in January, the crowd cracked on Ms. Mclay’s line about wine and Kleenex and cheered Ms. Arthur’s ability to dance her way past the PowerPoint glitch. After the presentations, women stood at tables around the perimeter of the hall to meet with the audience and investors.

“She, her, they all have very strong handshakes,” Ms. Arthur said, nodding at the two blazer-clad women who gave her their business cards. “You can tell they’re real investors.”

At her Desk, Ms. Mclay wore a t-shirt that read ” Money is my spirit animal.” “It’s fun, it’s good for branding awareness, but we’ll see if the checks come in,” she said. “This is the next step – what checks get written. Talk to me next week.”

I called her the next week. She was in contact with five new potential investors. “We got money from Able, which is great,” she said. “T. B. D. on other money. But I will say that those who talk to me, I know they are having a conversation because Able gave us money. Investors want to invest in who other people invest in.” Even in the “anti – ‘ Shark tank’, some funder-founder dynamics go beyond gender.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the role Amanda Eilean’s husband played at Starwood Capital Group. He was an early employee; he was not the founder of the firm.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the flavors of the e-cigarette cartridges Juul sells. They include fruit flavors rather than candy flavors. The article also misidentified the source of the $12.8 billion investment the company received. It was from Altria, not venture capitalists.

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