Girlboss, a leading media company that focuses on creating online content for women, has announced that it working on creating its own professional social-networking platform.
Girlboss Collective is expected to be launched in January 2019 and will be designed to create opportunities for women, but people of every gender will be able to sign up.
$3.5 million has been secured by way of funding from Initialized Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners to assist with the development of the website.
To begin with, it will only be open to users in the US, and members will have to pay a monthly subscription fee. However, Girlboss CEO Sophia Amoruso gave the assurance that the cost would be lower than $15 per month.
Amoruso said that pre-existing professional networks don’t put enough emphasis on a person’s personality and aren’t designed for modern women who may have to work multiple jobs at once.
She told the Wall Street Journal: “LinkedIn is a place that was built for another era of work, when the work we did was very traditional.
“Their product is really centered on that type of work: ‘Here’s nothing about my character and everything about where I went to school, and where I worked.’”
Bumble launched Bumble Bizz in October 2017, a platform built into the Bumble app where users can network and make professional connections.
Girlboss is running a competition, in association with Uber, and will split $200,000 worth of funding between three female-led startups.
This is similar to the Bumble Fund, which has pledged to award up to $1 million in funding to worthy businesses that are creating products for women by women.
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