Miami Makes its First Investment in Flywheel Startup Moxie Girl

Moxie Girl, a female-founded social enterprise based in Cincinnati that empowers girls across the country to build resilience, increase confidence and strengthen emotional and mental wellness through their online platform, received Miami University’s Social Impact Fund first investment. Moxie Girl’s online platform focuses on strengthening girls’ mental health and wellness through online programs, goal setting, and mentorship. They will use this capital to fuel their growth toward their bold goal of 10 million confident girls in 10 years.

Women founders receive only 3% of capital invested in startups annually. Miami University and Connetic Ventures are proud to provide critical seed capital to bridge this funding gap. The investment will spark tremendous social impact in mental health wellness and education for the women involved and the girls empowered by Moxie Girl.

Bill, Brett, and Kim Banham (from Connetic Ventures) speaking at Startup Week

In a partnership with Cincinnati’s Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub, Miami University pledged its first investment to Flywheel’s social impact accelerator. Moxie Girl was a member of Flywheel’s fourth accelerator cohort, which culminated in February with Demo Day. This relationship between Miami’s Social Impact Fund and Flywheel creates deal flow for the fund, as well as early-stage capital for social startups.

Lydia Henshaw (Moxie Girl founder) pitching at Demo Day

Connetic Ventures is a data-driven venture capital fund that uses Wendal, a machine learning platform that eliminates bias when making investment decisions. Connetic Ventures will match Miami University’s investment. This will bring critical seed capital to women innovating within the adolescent healthcare industry.

Miami’s student investors applied their learnings from programs like Wharton’s Social Impact Initiative, MIINT, to Flywheel’s upcoming cohort of social enterprises. In the first stage of their due diligence process, the Social Impact Fund students listened to pitches from high-impact social ventures as part of Demo Day for Cincinnati-based Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub. After attending Demo Day, hosting additional meetings with the Flywheel companies, and conducting further due diligence, the Social Impact Fund found Moxie Girl to be a great first impact investment for Miami University.

The Social Impact Fund students meeting with Alicia Robb from Next Wave Impact to learn about impact investing

Co-founders Lydia Henshaw (a former P&G digital innovation executive and multi-time founder) and Heather Moster (a former P&G front-end innovation global team leader and certified executive coach) both show a true passion for increasing teenage girls’ self-efficacy through their full-time commitment to continuing to scale a global business around both social and financial return. This past month, Moxie Girl completed their iOS and Android mobile development and launched on-demand video call capability between users and Moxie Girls to prevent social isolation during COVID-19. Through this launch, they also onboarded one of the largest pediatric firms in the state of Georgia, quickly followed by another pediatric firm in Northern Kentucky with a collective reach of thousands of preteen/teen girls.

The Social Impact Fund is looking forward to continuing to build the fund in upcoming academic years with additional rounds of funding in emerging social enterprises. In the words of the fund’s faculty advisor, Brett Smith, “This is a really important start to something great for our entrepreneurial ecosystem.”