herFunds was founded by Dr. Olimpija Hristova Zaevska, a sustainable finance expert who spent a decade on the institutional side of development finance, designing funding instruments, advising governments, and mobilizing capital through the EBRD, EIB, World Bank, UN Agencies, and global climate investment funds across more than twenty countries.
What became clear over the years sitting in many boardrooms and meetings with the highest government officials is that when women build, they do it with environmental and societal impact in mind. And that is what we want to supercharge, as humanity needs this more than ever.
Coming from a developing market herself, she experienced firsthand how difficult it is for women entrepreneurs to find funding opportunities that match their stage, sector, and geography. The information exists, but it is scattered across thousands of websites, in dozens of languages, with no single point of access.
herFunds was built to solve that. It is a funding discovery platform that brings together grants, venture capital, accelerators, incubators, angel investors, mentorship, and institutional support into one searchable database covering 90+ countries and 12 funding categories.
The Problem
Over $1.7 trillion in funding designed for women entrepreneurs goes underused, not because the capital is absent, but because it is invisible.1
Grants, loans, VC, accelerators, angel networks, mentorship programs, and institutional support are scattered across thousands of websites, in dozens of languages, opening and closing on their own timetables. A woman founder running a business in Nairobi, Skopje, or Bogota has no way to answer a simple question: what funding and support fits my stage, sector, and country right now?
But the problem goes deeper than discoverability. Most women founders do not even know what type of support they need at their current stage. A pre-revenue founder may be searching for a grant when what would actually move her forward is an accelerator that provides mentorship, structure, and investor introductions. A founder preparing to scale may not realize she qualifies for blended finance instruments or IFI-backed credit lines she has never heard of.
The landscape is not just hard to find, it is hard to interpret. Women are not only missing opportunities because they cannot see them. They are missing opportunities because they do not know those opportunities are meant for them, do not know whether a program is worth their time at the stage they are at, and do not know what the right next step even looks like.
The result is predictable. Deadlines pass unnoticed. Applications go to the wrong programs. Founders spend unpaid hours searching, bookmarking, joining WhatsApp groups, and still find out about their best opportunity two weeks after it closed. Or they stop looking altogether and conclude the money was never meant for them.
This is not a capital problem. It is an information, awareness, and timing problem.
¹ Estimate based on aggregated IFI, development bank, and public program funding windows with documented underdisbursement. See World Bank, IFC, and UN Women gender finance gap reports.
The Solution
herFunds is the discovery layer between women entrepreneurs and the funding that already exists for them.
One searchable database. All funding types. All regions. All sectors. Direct links to apply. No middleman, no gatekeeper.
The platform aggregates 12 categories of funding and support across 90+ countries: government grants, IFI programs, commercial bank lending, venture capital, angel networks, special purpose vehicles and funds, accelerators, incubators, corporate programs, competitions and awards, mentorship, investment readiness programs, and foundation grants. Each listing includes eligibility details, funding amounts, deadlines, application links, and whether the opportunity is women-specific or women-eligible.
herFunds is not a fund, not an accelerator, and not a gatekeeper. It is a layer of clarity that lets capital reach the women who can use it — especially in emerging markets and developing economies where visibility is often lowest.
Why this. Why now. Why her.
The funding landscape for women entrepreneurs has never been larger — and never harder to navigate. More than $5 billion in active opportunities are open right now across 90+ countries. The problem is not supply. The problem is that no single platform has mapped it, filtered it, and made it honest.
herFunds was built by someone who spent a decade on the institutional side: designing the instruments, advising the governments, sitting in the rooms where the programs were created. Dr. Olimpija Hristova Zaevska holds a PhD from Copenhagen Business School researching how capital reaches — or fails to reach — the people and regions that can use it best. She has mobilized $650M+ in climate and development finance across 30+ countries. She built herFunds because the question she kept getting asked after every panel, every training, every boardroom meeting was: what funding is actually out there for me?
herFunds is the answer she could not find anywhere else, so she built it.