Edition Launches $15K Grant to Back Women-Led Innovation

Edition has finally commenced the application process for the $15,000 Female Founder Grant that will enable women business owners from Australia and New Zealand to apply for the grant that is meant to promote entrepreneurship among women.

Edition’s founders, Jodie and Scott Kennedy founded the studio in 2020 as a design-oriented company that works with startups and fast-growing tech companies.

The 2026 Female Founder Grant will award one female entrepreneur a grant of Edition’s entrepreneurial consulting services of  $15,000. The services include founder workshops, mentoring, market intelligence, competition research, product strategy development, and pitching to investors. This program aims at equipping women entrepreneurs with the strategies to grow their businesses. The deadline for applying is July 27, 2026.

Last year, the grant program has been created by the company due to the recognition of a great gender imbalance in the studio’s client base. Speaking about the disparity in funding, Jodie pointed out that the startups working with the firm tend to align with the trends prevailing in venture capital investments. In this connection, although the firm aims at ensuring that both male and female founders would account for 50/50 in its portfolio by 2030, there is still a lot to do until then.

Key Highlights:

• Edition opens $15,000 grant to accelerate women-led startups
• Female founders in Australia and New Zealand invited to apply
• Grant offers mentorship, strategy support, and investor readiness

Jodie Kennedy said “Companies that we work with generally reflect where venture capital goes. By 2030 we’d love to be working with as many women as we are men, but the industry has a long way to go to get to that place.”

As per Jodie, out of all clients served by the firm during the last 12 months, less than 10 percent of them had at least one woman founder, while the percentage of firms having all-female founders was 2.5 percent. These numbers are not too different from the general trend prevailing in venture capital financing.

“The grant won’t fix the funding gap, but it removes one real barrier: getting support with the strategy, positioning and brand story right at the stage when a founder can least afford to access that help,” she added.

The first beneficiary of this grant is Leila Benab, the founder of airline decision intelligence company ReluGroup. She has been able to convert her initial funding into tangible results for her business. This includes an initial fundraising round of $880,000 in pre-seed money and a contract with an important airline group, proving the importance of seed funding for helping women entrepreneurs get investments and grow their businesses.

“When I applied, I had an early prototype and a lot of conviction, but not much else,” Leila noted.

“The grant gave me access to an invaluable foundation that I couldn’t have done on my own: help with brand positioning, a refined product strategy, and a version of the story that investors and customers clearly understood.”