About this event:

In 2021, US startups founded solely by women raised $6.4 billion in venture funding, 83 percent more than the previous year. Despite that surge, companies with solely women founders garnered only 2 percent of dollars invested in VC-backed startups in the US. Join the UNC Entrepreneurship Center for the Women’s History Month edition of our Innovation Speaker Series for a discussion about the disparities female founders face in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Shawna Lemon will discuss how her business xElle Ventures, a ‘for women, by women’ angel investment group, is looking to close the gaps in the arduous process of accessing capital as a woman. InsightFinder founder Helen Gu will join Lemon to give her firsthand account of what steps she took when starting her own company, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict, monitor, and repair IT incidents and anomalies. We will also explore how integrated networking and combating unconscious biases can reframe the way the ecosystem views female entrepreneurs. Eship Center interim Executive Director Jin Ellington will moderate.

The discussion, hosted by the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Entrepreneurship Center, will be facilitated in a virtual panel format. At the end of the session, there will be the opportunity for attendees to ask the panel questions directly. Students, faculty, and community members are encouraged to attend this interactive discussion. Immediately following the discussion, the speakers will engage in a private virtual networking session with a select group of UNC students.

About the speakers:

Shawna Cannon Lemon is the co-founder of xElle Ventures, a ‘for women by women’ angel investment fund that offers early-stage funding for female founders. She is also a co-founder of Stanek Lemon Crouse & Meeks, PA, a majority woman-owned intellectual property law firm, where she is a patent and intellectual property attorney and co-managing shareholder. Lemon has been named to the “Legal Elite” by Business North Carolina magazine and to "The Best Lawyers in America." She also received the Triangle Business Journal’s Women in Business Award in 2020. Lemon received her Bachelor of Science in biology from Wofford College and her doctorate in biomedical sciences with a concentration in pharmacology from the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. She received her Juris Doctor Degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001.

Helen Gu is the founder and CEO of InsightFinder Inc. She is also a professor at the Department of Computer Science of North Carolina State University and leads a research group supported by over $4.2 million research grants from NSF, NSA, ARO, Google, IBM and Credit Suisse. Her research on unsupervised behavior learning (UBL) technology was licensed by Google based on the superior accuracy achieved by UBL on real system failure data. She also worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center on the IBM stream processing system called System S which later becomes IBM's InfoSphere Stream product. Gu received her Ph.D. in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004 and her B.S. in computer science from Peking University in 1999. Her work has been widely reported by presses including NSF research highlights, Communications of ACM, and The Register, and won several best paper awards from prestigious international conferences.

Jin Ellington is the interim executive director of the UNC Entrepreneurship Center. She splits her time between the Eship Center and her position as the assistant director of business development at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. In June 2020, she started Notta Farm and Nursery, a plant nursery in Oxford, NC, with her husband and co-founder Michael. Ellington has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Chinese from Duke University and her M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction from Lesley University.

Event details:

Monday, March 28, 2022

4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. – Panel Discussion

5:15 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. - Q&A

5:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. - VIP Student Networking Session (invite only)

Note: A zoom link will be emailed to all registrants, prior to event.