Women Entrepreneurs Leading the Way in Growing Sex-Tech Industry (AVN)

Read the full article by Michael French at AVN.com

‘Elite Business’ Magazine Profiles Female-Founded Sex-Oriented Startup CompaniesIn 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 strict policies against putting their cash into sex-related businesses.